STUDENT ESSAY
On Imagination
by Zoe Edwards
IMAGINATION, PASCAL ONCE SAID, is“ the part of the human being which dominates, this mistress of error and falsehood, and all the more treacherous because it is not consistently treacherous.” 1 That is, imagination is the opposite of reason, the enemy of the rational. You could say that the one who lets his imagination run free is a madman, for he is so lacking reason that one could almost say he lacks his mind. But he goes on,
I am not speaking of mad people, I am speaking of the wisest, and it is among them that imagination has the overriding right to change their minds, reason may well complain, it can’ t put a price on things … it( imagination) cannot make fools into wise men, but it can make( emphasis mine) them, unlike reason, which can only make its friends miserable. 2
The child’ s imagination is a vision. It sparks missions and inspires real life.
At this point it is clear that imagination is being positioned opposite reason. And yet, for Pascal, imagination isn’ t madness. Is it sanity then? Then again, is reason sanity?
A child’ s imagination can be an example of a loss of reason that is not madness. What adult made a table into a house? Or at least, what adult made a table into a house without being called a lunatic? Yet children make houses out of tables and homes out of sofas and blankets. We encourage such things. Imagination in a child does indeed dominate, it takes over and creates a new world, yet a world like the real world. For children imagine themselves to be soldiers in battle, or mums with dinner to cook and a baby
1 Blaise Pascal, Pensées and Other Writings, trans. Honor Levi Oxford World’ s Classics( Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 16.
2 Ibid., 16-17.
14 THE COMMONS