Imagination

Use in the book

The painter passage describes imagination clothing things in images, both within one’s own soul and outwardly for others. Calling it the “eye” of intelligence makes a related claim about apprehension rather than decorative addition. In the taste/memory analogy, imagination is necessary to taste as simple memory is to cold judgment; the four terms remain distinct.

This power requires evaluation and direction. Joubert’s Rousseau remark traces a chain from senses to imagination to the person, parallel to appetites directing the heart. The Fontanes passage permits conceiving and explaining through images while refusing the same permission for judging and concluding. Consequently the lexicon cannot turn imagination’s vision into an unconditional warrant of truth. Its artistic and cognitive importance coexists with warnings about the work it is asked to do.

Places to read

1. I, p. 282, entry 3, ¶1Imagination clothes the bodiless in body, figure and images.
2. II, p. 830, entry 7, ¶1Imagination is the singular eye of intelligence.
3. II, p. 804, entry 7, ¶1Imagination supports taste in a four-term analogy with memory and judgment.
4. II, p. 623, entry 1, ¶1In Joubert’s judgment of Rousseau, senses direct imagination.
5. II, p. 732, entry 6, ¶1Images can explain without being sufficient to judge or conclude.

Translation in this edition

The English translation retains painter, clothing, eye and the complete analogy instead of reducing them to abstract faculty labels. The incomplete final “clothes in images” is not given an invented object. [Simple] on II.804 remains a contextual rendering of damaged si[…]ple.

Imaging and imagining

French: imager; imaginer; imaginative.

Joubert proposes separating imager, to image or form a picture, from imaginer, to imagine or form a mere idea, the latter conceived as a weakened form of the former. The conditional would reserves imagining for spiritual or intelligible things and imaging for bodily or perceptible ones. The next distinction gives imagination the power to spiritualize material things and the imaginative, translated imaging faculty, the habit of materializing spiritual things. Both processes are approved only when done well and aptly. These are proposed distinctions in one paragraph; they do not establish a universal translation rule for all earlier uses of imagination.

Places to read: II, p. 872, entry 4, ¶1.

Use in the book

Its work is strikingly double. In II.81 imagination removes the entire sensible world, allowing the reader to notice the space that cannot similarly be imagined away. In V.3 it requires boundless room in which thoughts and affections can move. But III.10 remembers the glass of imagination as a socially restricted medium: the child begins to see only what other people talk about and prize. Heaven and earth disappear from effective awareness while pennies and fine clothes fill it.

The contrast is between uses, not an announced division of faculties. Imagination can expose the narrowness of sense or reproduce the narrower horizons of custom. The reader must ask what supplies its objects, and whether it enlarges or confines enjoyment.

Places to read

1. II.81Imagining the world annihilated leaves its space still present to thought.
2. III.10Other people’s valuations crowd out the child’s direct apprehension of creation.
3. V.3Infinite extension supplies room for imaginations, desires, and affections.

In this edition

Traherne does not establish a fixed technical opposition between imagination and fancy. Their particular work must be inferred from the surrounding argument.

Use in the book

The December 10, 1834 definition is indispensable because it warns the reader against importing a tidy faculty psychology. Guérin knows that his usage is philosophically irregular and chooses it deliberately. He separates two activities within the large name: clothing ideas in images, and imagining what cannot be obtained from ordinary visible experience. The origin of those latter images remains unknown, their form ineffable. His refusal of received classifications protects the freedom to reconstruct both a soul and a world.

The surrounding entry tests the definition under conditions of loss. Imagination has dried up like a river, and things once illuminated now seem opaque and dead. Yet the same entry offers a rich description of imagination condensing the soul's vapors into cloudlike shapes. Failure and activity coexist in the account. The faculty is not simply a reliable instrument that may be switched on; it partly constitutes the felt world whose withdrawal he is attempting to describe.

Nor is its freedom unambiguously good. Its mobile pleasures resist practical reason, carry thought beyond stable belief, and leave the will breathlessly behind. In mourning, its earthly habits must be painfully redirected: it keeps giving bodily forms to a beloved person believed to inhabit an invisible life. Imagination offers access, intimacy, and consolation, while also revealing the difference between possession of an image and the person's actual presence. Guérin's definition is expansive, but his repeated qualifications prevent that expansion from becoming a settled claim to supernatural knowledge.

Places to read

1. 10 December 1834 · ¶2Guérin expressly enlarges the term beyond ordinary image-making and declines established classifications of the faculties.
2. 10 December 1834 · ¶1The drying river describes imagination as the sustaining circulation of inward joy.
3. 10 December 1834 · ¶4Cloud formation models imaginative shaping, but practical reason suffers beneath its unstable pleasures.
4. 2 February 1835 · ¶5Bereavement requires the painful alteration of habitual imaginative routes.
5. 12 February 1835 · ¶1Earthly image-making clothes the departed soul in recognizable features; consolation itself can renew grief.

Translation in this edition

The English preserves the defining phrase as “the name of inward life.” In the cloud passage it renders plural “imaginations” as “imaginings,” usefully distinguishing particular mental formations from the collective faculty, without making the French terminology more systematic than it is.

Use in the book

The Preface’s theory places an abundant imagination beside poor, dry existence (p. 9). Extensive reading lets modern people anticipate experience and lose illusions before enjoyment. René reproduces this mismatch when he imagines scenes inside lighted houses but has no friend under their roofs (p. 158). The faculty can enter other lives in thought while failing to establish an actual relation with them.

His defence against charges of inconstancy admits an imagination that races to the bottom of pleasures (p. 159). It does not merely invent impossible goods; it accelerates consumption, making the duration of even possible pleasures intolerable. At the cottage, the absent beloved becomes everything around him. The declaration that he could create worlds (p. 163) culminates this apparent fertility, immediately before bodily languor and ennui expose its limits.

Imagining also helps René discover Amélie’s pain after the revelation. Yet his earlier conjecture that she loves an unidentified man is wrong precisely because it makes a plausible narrative fit incomplete evidence. Imagination thus alternates between projection and belated understanding. Souël’s ‘infatuated with chimeras’ condemns a mode of living, not every act of making images.

The authorial Defence itself promises ‘pictures for the imagination’ as part of religious apology (Preface p. 13), and the 1805 reviewer praises imaginative power while admitting its intoxicating danger (p. 356). The medium used to criticize René’s self-enchantment resembles the faculty being criticized. This productive tension explains why the book can both attract the reader into an experience and warn against making that experience one’s whole life.

Places to read

1. Preface p. 9L'imagination est riche, abondante et merveilleuse — The programmatic account values the faculty’s richness even while describing its imbalance with lived existence.
2. p. 159de ne pouvoir jouir long-temps de la même chimère — The accusation concerns rapid exhaustion and replacement of imagined satisfactions.
3. p. 160tout étoit ce fantôme imaginaire — Nature becomes the projected embodiment of a not-yet-realized love.
4. p. 189un jeune homme entêté de chimères — Souël gives the imaginative attachment a severe practical and moral diagnosis.

Translation in this edition

The supplied 1802 reading at p. 15923456 calls the imagination ‘avide’; 1826 omits the adjective. At p. 158 ‘en imagination’ becomes ‘par la pensée’. These shifts reduce explicit naming without eliminating the operations involved. ‘Esprit romanesque’ on p. 157 means a mind shaped by romance-like fancies, not a fully defined later literary movement.

Use in the book

The dedication joins these capacities because either can fail without the other. An imagination that projects its own certainty onto every unknown world simply enlarges prejudice. A modesty that refuses to inquire because it distrusts itself would leave every dimensional boundary intact. The romance seeks an active willingness to think further while recognizing the limits of the resulting thought.

The reader first exercises imagination through manageable instructions: imagine a sheet of paper, lower an eye toward a coin, follow the implications of an intersecting Sphere. These exercises enlist known experience to approach an unfamiliar standpoint. Their success depends on the reader's willingness to suspend an effortless overhead view and inhabit the constraints of a lower-dimensional observer.

The Sphere demonstrates the difference between advanced perception and modesty. It can explain the Square's error, yet reacts angrily when the same argument threatens its own limit. The Square, in turn, can become a forceful speculative pupil without ceasing to be a patronizing teacher to those below him. The narrative's reversals show why additional knowledge is not automatically self-criticism.

The last image complicates imagination further. Under imprisonment, the narrator fears that the substantial world itself is an offspring of diseased imagination. The faculty named as a hope in the dedication becomes vulnerable to the vocabulary of pathology. This is not a simple reversal from good imagination to bad fantasy. The institutional attack on the witness and his declining ability to picture a Cube make it difficult for him to distinguish failure of representation from failure of reality.

The desired reader therefore holds together two responsibilities: to resist official closures of possibility, and to resist turning an attractive possibility into unwarranted certainty. The Preface23 states this balance; the fate of the narrator makes clear how costly it can be to maintain.

Places to read

1. Dedication“Enlargement of the Imagination” names one hoped-for effect of reading
2. Dedication“Gift of Modesty” identifies a virtue rather than an extra dimension
3. § 12“Imagine a vast sheet of paper” begins the practical work of changing standpoint
4. Preface23“moderate and modest minds” describes the readers the work seeks
5. § 2223“a diseased imagination” is the narrator's feared explanation in periods of weakness

In this edition

The edition notes the Prayer Book resonance of the dedication and compares Abbott's later reflections on modesty. Those connections illuminate the chosen word without proving that every character's ascent is a religious conversion in the same sense.

Dimensional prejudices

Assumptions imposed by one's accustomed range of perception and movement. The Preface23 distributes this limitation across Points, Lines, Squares and higher beings rather than restricting it to Flatland. Printed form: Dimensional prejudices (Preface23). See Imagination and modesty.

Gift of Modesty

The intellectual and ethical humility the dedication hopes its supposedly superior readers may acquire. Calling it a gift does not make it an automatic consequence of inhabiting Space. Printed form: Gift of Modesty (Dedication). See Imagination and modesty.

Imagination

The faculty whose enlargement the book desires, enabling readers to entertain a standpoint beyond familiar perception. Its desired companion is modesty, because imaginative reach alone need not overcome prejudice. Printed form: Imagination (Dedication). See Imagination and modesty.

Modesty

Restraint in judging one's own knowledge and superiority. It asks a reader to admit a possible limit without forbidding active speculation. Printed form: Modesty (Dedication). See Imagination and modesty.

Both kinds of dogmatism (contextual phrase)

Preface23: “This can never be” and “It must needs be precisely thus”. These opposite claims are paired as refusals of a properly limited mind. One closes inquiry by denying possibility; the other closes it by dictating the exact contents of the unknown. The alternative is not indifference between truth and falsehood. It is a willingness to distinguish what is experienced, what can be demonstrated, what analogy makes thinkable and what remains conjecture. The Square and Sphere exchange roles under this test: each can expose one boundary and protect the next. The reader is not asked to approve every imaginative assertion but to notice when a confident verdict exceeds its grounds. See Faith reason and the reach of experience and Imagination and modesty.

To aspire is better than to be blindly and impotently happy (contextual phrase)

§202. “to aspire is better than to be blindly and impotently happy”

The dreamed Sphere offers this lesson while displaying Pointland's complete self-contentment. The Point's happiness is not questioned because it lacks intensity: its hymn celebrates existence ecstatically. The difficulty is that no independent being or corrective thought can enter its account of the world. Aspiration names an opening towards something beyond the self's present circumference. Yet the setting qualifies the authority of the moral. The waking Sphere had just punished his pupil's aspiration beyond three dimensions; only the dreamed figure now endorses it and acknowledges error. The statement is consequently both an instruction to the Square and an imagined correction of the teacher whose real conduct had contradicted it.

See also. Pointland · Dream and vision · Imagination and modesty

Use in the book

Receiving, keeping and making forms

Burton introduces imagination in an anatomy intended to make the later medical discussion intelligible. The sensitive soul apprehends the forms of things present or absent and retains them as wax retains a seal's impression. The five outward senses are concerned with present external objects; the inward senses can work with what is past, absent or expected. Common sense coordinates and judges the information brought by sight, hearing and the other senses. Imagination examines those forms more fully, keeps them longer, recalls them and makes new ones. Memory is the recording officer that stores what the senses have brought and supplies it when imagination or reason calls. These functions overlap, but Burton does not simply give three names to the same operation.

This is an embodied account. The anatomical discussion places imagination and thought in the middle ventricle; the later definition calls its organ the “middle cell of the Brain”. A cell here is a chamber or cavity. Memory has a posterior seat, while the spirits received and refined in the brain serve sensation and movement. Burton reports these assignments as the positions of the writers he is summarizing. A later causal passage places imagination in the foremost part of the brain. The difference should remain visible rather than being repaired into one perfectly consistent anatomical map.

Imagination also provides material for rational understanding. The active understanding abstracts intelligible forms from imagination, judges whether what imagination has received from sense is true or false, and entrusts the result to the passive understanding. The fact that material requires judgment does not mean it is invariably false. Imagination is part of the route by which knowledge becomes possible. Its creative activity is equally explicit: Burton points to poets' fictions and painters' “Anticks,” grotesque figures or fanciful designs, naming Ovid's house of Sleep and Psyche's palace in Apuleius. Later he appeals to painters, practitioners of mechanical arts and mathematicians when describing the constructions of waking fancy. These examples sit beside delusive castles in the air, but the whole capacity for making images cannot be reduced to illness.

A faculty that moves the body

Imagination is not merely an inward picture gallery. In the account of movement, Burton distinguishes the end, the object pursued or avoided, from the efficient cause, the source that sets action going. A dog catches a hare for the sake of the hare as its object; imagination moves appetite, appetite activates the moving faculty, and bodily spirits mediate the command to the organs. In humans reason, or imagination subordinate to it, is the efficient cause; in other animals imagination has no higher governing faculty in this particular scheme. Nerves, muscles and tendons transmit the movement to the limb. This chain distinguishes the directing faculty from the bodily instruments through which it acts.

The same connection explains how an emotion may affect digestion, sensation and bodily constitution. An object reaches imagination through outward sense or memory. Imagination misconceives or magnifies it and communicates it to the heart; spirits move between brain and heart, and the heart draws on bodily humours in pursuing or avoiding the apparent good or evil. The response varies with the intensity of the apprehension and the prior disposition of the humours. Passion can draw spirits away from other functions, so that someone looks without noticing or hears without attending. Burton's claim that impaired imagination is the first source of troubles “in this kinde” belongs to this particular account of emotional disturbance. It does not abolish the bodily causes that can themselves damage imagination.

Burton presses the faculty's importance by adopting Arnoldus's claim that melancholy should be attributed far more to imagination than to bodily distemper. Yet the surrounding discussion repeatedly describes reciprocal action: defective organs and altered humours disturb imagination; disturbed imagination moves spirits and humours and produces further bodily effects. At the close of the digression he calls it the “medium deferens” of the passions, their conveying medium. The passions work through it, with effects proportioned both to its heightened or relaxed activity and to the body's disposition. It is therefore neither an immaterial explanation detached from physiology nor a claim that the sufferer can stop the whole process by an act of choice.

Sleep, waking invention and the appearance of an assailant

During sleep the external senses and common sense are suspended, while imagination is free to make strange combinations. Burton's phrase about imagination being free also adds its commander, reason; he leaves an awkward tension between “alone” and this addition. He recognizes natural, divine and demonic kinds of dream, and relates variations to humours, diet, actions and objects. The bodily explanation of sleep describes vapours obstructing the passages of the spirits until the obstruction disperses.

In the imagination digression, this framework explains the sleeper who believes an old woman is riding and crushing him. The names “Incubus, or Witch-ridden” express the oppressive experience and its supposed assailant. Burton says that in this case nothing is causing the trouble except bad humours disturbing imagination. The explanation of sleepwalking is similarly sequential: vapours move imagination, imagination moves appetite, appetite moves animal spirits, and the body walks as though awake. The experience of a figure or the performance of an action does not, by itself, establish the presence of the being imagined.

The next passage takes a different position. Accounts of journeys to the other world, apparitions, revelations and witches' travels are referred, through Weyer, Vanini and others, to imagination and the devil's illusions. In the marginal account attributed to Weyer, the devil governs the women's imaginations while their bodies remain insensible. This is a theory of deceptive experience that retains demonic agency. It must not be made identical with the wholly humoral account of the witch-ridden sleeper just before it. Burton's chapters preserve several explanatory possibilities and disputes rather than a single general rejection of the supernatural.

From pleasurable invention to a fixed world

The power to retain and amplify representations helps explain why imagination is especially dangerous in melancholy. Its objects remain before the mind, enlarged by continual meditation, until in some people real bodily effects follow. The prolonged thought itself may at first be delightful. In the discussion of voluntary solitude, the person acts many roles in an inward theatre, builds castles in the air and loses the wish to interrupt these pleasurable occupations. Ordinary business is neglected. Once the habit is established, a distressing object can change the scene: the same persistent activity now supplies fear and sorrow. Burton gives the pleasure, the gradual loss of freedom and the later change their separate places in the account.

The dispute about which mental faculty is injured makes a further distinction. Some authorities put the defect in imagination alone. Others ask why reason does not correct a person's conviction of being a shellfish or being damned, if reason is entirely sound. Burton's stated settlement is that the disorder begins in imagination and may reach reason as it becomes established or prolonged; another formulation calls the damage to belief and reasoning a secondary consequence of imagination's defect. He returns to this sequence in erotic melancholy, qualifying the involvement of both faculties by the violence or long establishment of the condition. It is important to preserve the proposed sequence and qualification rather than to make every act of imagination an impairment of reason.

Erotic examples show representation crossing the boundary between absence and apparent presence. A description or letter can convey the beauty of someone never seen: the imagination receives its material through language as well as eyesight. In the symptoms of love, the “Astrolabe of phantasie” measures every feature and dimension of the beloved so intensely that the lover may finally think he sees and embraces her. The astrolabe is a measuring instrument; here it figures the meticulous survey and retention of her image. Ixion embracing a cloud instead of Juno supplies the discrepancy between apparent possession and the object actually present. The later Lucretian quotation about “simulachra”, images of the absent beloved, gives a related account of continuing remembrance. Its philosophical image-language and the surrounding love examples should remain distinguishable.

Real effects and reported marvels

The force-of-imagination chapter deliberately puts ordinary reactions beside extraordinary reports. Blushing, trembling, sweating, fainting and dizziness belong to the same broad inquiry as illnesses allegedly brought on by a physician's words or a diviner's prediction. In Cotta's two stories, a physician conjectures sciatica in a woman who did not have it, and merely names cramp to another; their apprehension of the words is then credited with producing the suffering. Burton also reports cures through favourable expectation. A conceit in these examples is a belief or powerful mental impression, and its alleged bodily efficacy is different from the truth of what is believed.

His answer to readers who laugh at such stories is the plank experiment: the same surface can be walked on confidently at ground level but provoke trembling when placed high above the ground. In the later explanation of symptoms, an imagined reader objects that the person on the height has a genuine external danger. Burton replies that the melancholy sufferer also has a cause, though an inward one, carried about as inseparably as a shadow. Advice alone can do little while the bodily causes persist. The example does more than defend the abstract power of images: it opposes ridicule and the assumption that serious distress can simply be willed away.

Maternal impressions extend the proposed action of an image into another developing body. Burton invokes Jacob's speckled rods, Persinna's explanation in Heliodorus for her child's complexion, the Greek husband's pictures of beautiful people, and accounts of pregnant women's cravings or frightening impressions marking their children. These are scriptural interpretation, romance, reported anecdote and historical physiological theory, not equivalent kinds of evidence. The point in Burton is that a form pictured in the mother's mind is supposedly impressed upon the child. Explaining that belief does not authenticate the mechanism or make a mother's thoughts responsible for a child's bodily features.

The discussion of spells and weapon salve turns from objects used in cures to the confidence attached to them. Burton attributes to Pomponazzi the claim that strong conception and opinion set humours, spirits and blood in motion and thereby remove the cause of an illness from an affected part. The patient's trust similarly explains why an unlearned practitioner may achieve a more striking result than a learned physician. This is an argument within Burton's physiology and his account of belief; the list of purported cures does not independently prove that the treatments worked. A significant textual disagreement between disbelief in the body and credulity in the margin is retained below.

Proteus, another person's spirits, and reason's rudder

The comparison with “Proteus, or a Cameleon” makes imagination mutable and commanding. The Ficino quotation in the margin is decisive about the comparison's subject: imagination is like Proteus or a chameleon, sometimes affecting its own body and another's. The next examples move through apparently communicable sore eyes, yawning, a provoked bodily urge and the unpleasant scraping of plates or files. These heterogeneous observations introduce a larger claim about influence between people.

At the next step Burton asks about a corpse bleeding before its murderer and about children supposedly bewitched by witches or old women. The opinion he attributes to a list of writers is that one party's forceful imagination moves and alters the other's spirits. The imagined agent and the affected recipient are distinct. Reducing the passage to the recipient being frightened by their own imagination would change the claim. Burton then reports still larger supposed powers: affecting remote people, moving bodies, and raising storms. Avicenna, al-Kindi, Paracelsus and others are the named authorities for those extensions.

Burton's own concluding image calls imagination “astrum hominis,” the human being's star, and the rudder of our ship. A star suggests governing influence; a rudder directs a vessel. Reason ought to steer, but can be overborne by imagination and allow the whole ship to be overturned. The conclusion brings the extraordinary reports back to the question already present in the elementary anatomy: how a necessary faculty can cease to serve its proper governor. It does not turn every marvel quoted in support of imagination's force into a separately verified event.

Reassurance, religious thought and the limits of reduction

The later symptom discussion gives inward causes for sights and sounds that seem external. Burton uses the brain as a concave mirror, the altered appearance of things through coloured glass, intoxication, weak sight and objects imperfectly seen in the dark. Imagination is involved in different ways: forming an appearance, interpreting an uncertain object, and cooperating with impaired organs. His literary example has Orestes believe the Furies are attacking while Electra tells him he does not see what he thinks he sees. The account is Burton's explanatory use of the dramatic scene, not proof that the drama itself endorses his physiology.

Treatment likewise addresses both the images and the circumstances in which they persist. Burton recommends diverting fixed thoughts, providing suitable occupation and company, offering reassurance, and supplying a friend's help when the sufferer cannot resist alone. Hope and counsel may work on the same imaginative route by which fear brought distress. His more theatrical examples include a lead cap that makes a king feel the head he believes missing and a secretly introduced snake that appears to confirm a supposed cure. These are reported contrivances in his historical therapeutic argument. The examples should be read alongside the admission that deeply established imaginings and continuing bodily causes may defeat simple persuasion.

Religious passages retain further distinctions. Burton can describe people who reason coherently in other matters but have an impaired imagination on one religious subject, comparing them to comets that are round except where they blaze. He also allows beneficial contemplation and ecstasy: a taste of future happiness, a divine melancholy and a spiritual wing raising the soul towards God, before distinguishing abuse that becomes religious melancholy. That express concession prevents the wider catalogue of fasting, visions and delusions from being summarized as a declaration that all religious ecstasy is pathological.

In consoling people troubled by blasphemous thoughts, the presence of an image or thought is separated from willing consent. Burton connects such experiences with bodily disturbance and, in his theological explanation, demonic suggestions; he insists that thoughts the sufferer abhors and resists do not express a settled will. Even partial assent followed by rejection is distinguished from a confirmed disposition. At the end of the work he again permits an inward bodily cause for terrifying appearances, while immediately allowing demonic agency and mixed remedies. The ordinary faculty, its impaired operation, the content presented to it and responsibility for that content remain different questions.

Related entries

Melancholy: disposition, illness and the disputed faculties affected

Spirits: the bodily agents through which imagination is said to act

Witchcraft: imagined assaults, deception and claims about supernatural agency

Charms: belief, trust and the attributed efficacy of remedies

Jealousy: the amplification of signs and the relation of suspicion to action

Related articles and topics: Apprehension; Cerebral chambers; Common sense; Conceit; Ecstasy; Faculty; Incubus; Maternal impressions; Memory and recollection; Reason; Religious melancholy; Simulacra; Species in perception. These continue particular distinctions and examples rather than naming interchangeable faculties

Places to read

1. The inward anatomyVentricles and spirits; the wax-and-seal representation; common sense, imagination and memory; productive invention; sleep; the distinction between an action's end and efficient cause
2. Imagination and understandingActive understanding receives and judges the material abstracted from imagination
3. Which faculty is affected?Rival accounts and Burton's qualified sequence from imagination to reason
4. Maternal impressions before the main digressionFear, cravings and images allegedly affecting an infant
5. Pleasurable solitude becoming habitualInward role-playing, neglected occupations and the change from delight to distress
6. The passions' bodily routeSense or memory, imagination, heart, spirits and humours; the strong claim about imagination's causal importance
7. The force-of-imagination digressionRead the whole subsection for its progression. Retention and amplification are at 08–09; nightmare oppression and sleepwalking at 10–11; visions and witches' journeys at 12; waking inventions and fear at 13–14; maternal and transformative marvels at 15–20; harmful and helpful expectations at 21–26; charms and trust at 27–29; Proteus and interpersonal influence at 30–32; the reading list and conveying-medium conclusion at 33–34
8. An inward cause is still a causeFocus on paragraphs 24–26. Burton's explanatory aim, competing bodily accounts, the plank objection and his answer to ridicule
9. Apparent external objectsImages in eyes or brain, mirror and coloured-glass comparisons, Orestes and Electra, weak sight and mistaken interpretation
10. Reassurance and contrivanceRedirecting thought, a helper's role, the qualification about established imaginings, and reported treatments using hope, conversation or a staged experience
11. Erotic imagination and reasonFocus on paragraphs 60–63. Rival bodily seats and the qualified impairment of both faculties
12. Beauty through report and readingA beloved need not first be seen; words can supply the representation
13. The astrolabe and the absent belovedIntense measuring and recollection becoming apparent presence
14. Images remaining in absenceThe Lucretian images and name within a catalogue of erotic remembrance
15. Ecstasy before its abuseFocus on paragraph 10. Fasting and visions, with the explicit favourable account of contemplation and divine melancholy
16. A circumscribed impairmentThe comet comparison amid Burton's religious polemic
17. Unwanted thoughts and consentImagination, humours, demonic attribution and the distinction between occurrence, resistance and settled will
18. The closing account of frightening appearancesPossible inward causes, followed by a supernatural possibility and the appeal to mixed remedies

In this edition

The modern rendering uses imagination for “Phantasie”, and fancy, or imagination for the paired names. It renders “læsa Imaginatio” as impaired imagination, “corrupt imagination” as an impaired imagination, “our phantasies” as our imaginations, and “crased phantasie” as disordered imagination. These choices preserve the older faculty vocabulary while distinguishing a medical impairment from the moral judgments made in other contexts. “Species of sensible things” becomes sensory forms of things; “species of objects” becomes mental images of objects. Neither expression concerns biological classification.

Three local qualifications particularly affect interpretation. First, the middle chamber assigned to imagination and the front part named are both retained. Second, Burton's Latin quotation contains “ferè,” almost, and is followed by his English comparative restatement. The modern column translates the Latin's “almost the whole cause” and then preserves Burton's separate “far more” formulation; these should not be flattened into an unqualified statement that imagination is the only cause. Third, the Latin in the Ficino margin expressly makes imagination the Proteus/chameleon comparator. Its English translation in that note is editorial prose explaining the quoted Latin, not another sentence written by Burton.

The body prints “wicked incredulity”, which the modern column renders wicked disbelief. The Weyer quotation in the margin instead has “impia credulitate”, impious credulity or ready belief. The two readings disagree. The supplied editorial note reports the same disagreement in another 1651 copy, but that report neither establishes the origin of the discrepancy nor licenses silently changing the body to credulity. This article has checked the supplied body, modern rendering and apparatus; it has not freshly collated those historical copies or Weyer's text.

Burton's references are likewise evidence of what he invokes, not a guarantee that every attribution is exact. His sequence brings together natural philosophy, medical anecdotes, scripture, romance, poetry, reported wonders and theological argument. The present article explains the significant uses represented here without claiming a complete occurrence concordance or independent verification of every external authority.

alone

Printed “alone” (English).

Citation key, Printed form, Modern rendering: alone

By itself or exclusively; said of imagination’s freedom in sleep, awkwardly followed by the addition of reason.

Source: original body

Source wording: common sense resteth, the outward senses rest also. The Phantasie alone is free, and his commander, Reason: as appeares by those imaginarie Dreames, which are of divers kinds, Natural, Divine

Layer: paired modern rendering

Anticks

Printed “Anticks” (English).

Grotesque figures or fanciful designs in artistic invention.

Source: original body

Source wording: Imagination forcibly workes, as appears by their several Fictions, Anticks, Images: as Ovids house of sleep, Psyches palace in Apuleius, &c. In men it is subject and governed by Reason, or

Modern rendering: grotesques

Layer: paired modern rendering

Astrolabe of phantasie

Printed “Astrolabe of phantasie” (English).

A measuring-instrument image for the detailed imaginative survey of the beloved.

Source: original body

Source wording: of her dimensions, are so survaied, measured, and taken, by that Astrolabe of phantasie, and that so violently sometimes, with such earnestness and eagerness, such continuance, so strong an imagination,

Modern rendering: astrolabe of imagination

Layer: paired modern rendering

astrum hominis

Printed “astrum hominis” (Latin).

The human being’s star: a governing-influence image for imagination.

Source: original body

Source wording: I may certainly conclude, this strong conceit or imagination, is astrum hominis, and the rudder of this our ship, which reason should steer, but overborn by phantasie, cannot manage, and so suffers

Modern rendering: the human being’s star

Layer: paired modern rendering

corrupt imagination

Printed “corrupt imagination” (English).

A disordered image-forming faculty; not merely immoral content.

Source: original body

Source wording: is a passion of the brain, as all other melancholy, by reason of corrupt imagination, and so doth Jason Pratensis c. 19. de morb. cerebri, (who writes copiously of this Eroticall love) place and reckon

Modern rendering: an impaired imagination

Layer: paired modern rendering

crased phantasie

Printed “crased phantasie” (English).

Disordered imagination suggesting frightening shapes.

Source: original body

Source wording: almost, may reflect and shew prodigious shapes, as our vain fear and crased phantasie shall suggest and faign,

Modern rendering: disordered imagination

Layer: paired modern rendering

Efficient cause

Printed “Efficient cause” (English).

Source initiating movement, distinct from its end.

Source: original body

Source wording: That which moves, is either the Efficient cause, or End. The end is the object, which is desired or eschued; as in a dog to catch a hare, &c. The efficient cause

Modern rendering: efficient cause

Layer: paired modern rendering

End

Printed “End” (English).

The object desired or avoided, for whose sake movement occurs.

Source: original body

Source wording: That which moves, is either the Efficient cause, or End. The end is the object, which is desired or eschued; as in a dog to catch a hare, &c. The efficient cause in man is

Modern rendering: end

Layer: paired modern rendering

ferè

Printed “ferè” (Latin).

Almost; limits the Latin quotation’s causal claim.

Source: original body

Source wording: therefore conclude with Arnoldus, Maxima vis est phantasiæ, & huic uni ferè, non autem corporis intemperiei, omnis melancholiæ causa est ascribenda: Great is the force of Imagination, and much

Modern rendering: almost

Layer: paired modern rendering

Foremost part of the brain

Printed “foremost part of the brain” (English). Citation key: foremost part of the brain.

Citation key, Printed form, Source wording: foremost part of the brain

The front region of the brain, assigned here as the seat of imagination. The article preserves its difference from the middle chamber named in the earlier anatomy.

Source: original body

Modern rendering: front part of the brain

Layer: paired modern body

imaginatio læsa

Printed “imaginatio læsa” (Latin).

Impaired imagination in the discussion of erotic melancholy.

Source: original body

Source wording: ’tis imaginatio læsa; and both imagination and reason are misaffected; because of his corrupt judgement, and continuall meditation of that

Modern rendering: an impaired imagination

Layer: paired modern rendering

impia credulitate

Printed “impia credulitate” (Latin).

Impious credulity or ready belief in the original marginal Latin.

Source: original marginal quotation

Source wording: Ut impia credulitate quis læditur, sic & levari eundem credibile est, usuque observatum.

Modern rendering: impious credulity

Layer: editorial translation within Burton-labelled note

in this kinde

Printed “in this kinde” (English).

In this class or sort; a scope qualification on imagination as the source of emotional grievances.

Source: original body

Source wording: stronger: So that the first step and fountain of all our grievances in this kinde, is læsa Imaginatio, which mis-informing the Heart, causeth all these distemperatures, alteration and confusion of

Modern rendering: of this kind

Layer: paired modern rendering

Incubus, or Witch-ridden

Printed “Incubus, or Witch-ridden” (English).

Nightmare oppression and the sleeper’s supposed assailant, here given a humoral explanation.

Source: original body

Source wording: times absurd and prodigious things, and in such as are troubled with Incubus, or Witch-ridden (as we call it) if they lie on their backs, they suppose an old woman rides, and sits so hard upon them, that they

Modern rendering: incubus, or “witch-ridden,”

Layer: paired modern rendering

læsa Imaginatio

Printed “læsa Imaginatio” (Latin).

Impaired imagination, which misinforms the heart in this causal account.

Source: original body

Source wording: first step and fountain of all our grievances in this kinde, is læsa Imaginatio, which mis-informing the Heart, causeth all these distemperatures, alteration and confusion of spirits and humors.

Modern rendering: impaired imagination

Layer: paired modern rendering

medium deferens

Printed “medium deferens” (Latin).

Conveying medium of the passions.

Source: original body

Source wording: I have thus far digressed, because this imagination is the medium deferens of passions, by whose means they work and produce many times prodigious effects; and as the phantasie is more or less

Modern rendering: conveying medium

Layer: paired modern rendering

middle cell of the Brain

Printed “middle cell of the Brain” (English).

The middle chamber assigned as the faculty’s organ.

Source: original body

Source wording: absurd shapes, as in sick men we commonly observe. His organ is the middle cell of the Brain; his objects all the Species communicated to him by the Common sense, by comparison of which he faines infinite other

Modern rendering: brain’s middle chamber

Layer: paired modern rendering

our phantasies

Printed “our phantasies” (English).

Our imaginations as recipients of unwanted thoughts in Burton’s theological account.

Source: original body

Source wording: and divert our souls, to suggest such blasphemous thoughts into our phantasies, ungodly, profane, monstrous and wicked conceits:

Modern rendering: our imaginations

Layer: paired modern rendering

Phantasie

Printed “Phantasie” (English).

Imagination among the three inward senses.

Source: original body

Source wording: external sense, according to Lullius. Inward are three; Common sense, Phantasie, Memory.

Modern rendering: imagination

Layer: paired modern rendering

Phantasie, or Imagination

Printed “Phantasie, or Imagination” (English).

The internal faculty that examines, retains, recalls and invents forms.

Source: original body

Source wording: Phantasie, or Imagination, which some call Æstimative, or Cogitative, (confirmed, saith Fernelius, by frequent meditation) is an inner sense

Modern rendering: Fancy, or imagination

Layer: paired modern rendering

Proteus, or a Cameleon

Printed “Proteus, or a Cameleon” (English).

Mutable imagination; the original Latin margin establishes the comparator’s subject.

Source: original body

Source wording: turn and winde, so imperiously command our bodies, which as another Proteus, or a Cameleon, can take all shapes; and is of such force (as Ficinus adds) that it can work upon others, as well as our selves.

Modern rendering: Proteus or a chameleon

Layer: paired modern rendering

simulachra

Printed “simulachra” (Latin).

Images or likenesses of the absent beloved; the apparatus notes the Lucretian image-film sense.

Source: original body

Source wording: Nam si abest quod ames, præsto simulachra tamen sunt Illius, & nomen dulce obversatur ad aures.

Modern rendering: images

Layer: paired modern rendering

species of objects

Printed “species of objects” (English).

Mental representations of objects, retained and magnified.

Source: original body

Source wording: most especially it rageth in melancholy persons, in keeping the species of objects so long, mistaking, amplifying them by continual and strong meditation, until at length it produceth in some parties

Modern rendering: mental images of objects

Layer: paired modern rendering

Species of sensible things

Printed “Species of sensible things” (English).

Sensory forms through which present or absent things are apprehended.

Source: original body

Source wording: Apprehending or Moving. By the Apprehensive power we perceive the Species of sensible things present, or absent, and retaine them as waxe doth the print of a seale. By the Moving, the Body is outwardly carried

Modern rendering: sensory forms of things

Layer: paired modern rendering

strong conceit or apprehension

Printed “strong conceit or apprehension” (English).

A strong conception or impression credited with bodily effects.

Source: original body

Source wording: sick, and alters their temperature in an instant. And sometimes a strong conceit or apprehension, as Valesius proves, will take away Diseases: in both kindes it will produce real effects. Men if they see but another

Modern rendering: strong idea or impression

Layer: paired modern rendering

wicked incredulity

Printed “wicked incredulity” (English).

Wicked disbelief in the printed body, in conflict with the quoted Latin margin.

Source: original body

Source wording: superstitious cures, and such as are done by Mountebanks and Wizards. As by wicked incredulity many men are hurt (so saith Wierus of Charms, Spels, &c.) we finde in our experience, by the same means many are relieved

Modern rendering: wicked disbelief

Layer: paired modern rendering

Æstimative, or Cogitative

Printed “Æstimative, or Cogitative” (English).

Names of estimative or thinking powers grouped here under imagination.

Source: original body

Source wording: Phantasie, or Imagination, which some call Æstimative, or Cogitative, (confirmed, saith Fernelius, by frequent meditation) is an inner sense which doth more fully examine the species

Modern rendering: the estimative or cogitative faculty

Layer: paired modern rendering