Patterns: groundwork for a philosophy of imagination

Abstract

In her extremely valuable book The Nature of Metaphysical Thinking (Revised edition, Macmillan 1966) - a book which, unhappily, I read too late to incorporate in this thesis - Dorothy Emmet says that the metaphysician is one who declares the "importance" of a "spiritual or intellectual experience" and then, taking off for higher regions, uses the idea of this experience "to impose a perspective on the world as a whole." My thesis is a work of metaphysics insofar as it asserts and presupposes the importance of a certain intellectual (but not spiritual) experience (we can call it 'the imagination archetype') but it is not a work of metaphysics insofar as I do not attempt to impose a perspective on 'the world as a whole' but only on 'thinking'. The imagination archetype can be set out as follows :