We are when we think upon any desperate deed; but, under imagination, we become simple spectators, as it were, of a pictorial representation of terrible or daring achievements. There are, in conception itself, the distinctions of knowledge, opinion, reflexion, and their contraries, of which we shall speak elsewhere. With respect to thinking, since it is different from feeling, and feeling seems, in part, to be imagination and, in part, conception, let us here define imagination, and then proceed to the consideration of the other faculty.
If imagination be a faculty by which we say that an image of some kind, and that not merely in the sense of a metaphor, is called up within us, then it is to be ranged among those faculties or powers, such as feeling, opinion, knowledge, mind, by which we form judgments and determine what may be true or false.
It is clear from what follows, that imagination is not sensation ; for sensation is either a faculty or an act, such as sight, and seeing, but an image is sometimes apparent to us without either faculty or act, as phantoms in dreams for instance; and then sensation is ever present, which is not the case with the imagination. If, moreover, imagination were in act identical with sensation, we should have to admit that it must belong to all irrational creatures, but this does not seem to be the case with the ant, bee, or worm; and then sensations are always true, but imaginings are for the most part false. Hence, we do not say, when accurately
