Tuesday, April 8, 2008

Imagination (perception)

Locke talks about perception or imagination in terms of them being confined to very narrow limits. He goes on to say that the creative power of the mind is no more than us combining, augmenting and transposing the senses and experiences we have gathered throughout life. Like the example about the gold mountain or the virtuous horse. Neither might not actually exist but in our imagination we can combine the idea of things we know. So we could imagine a gold mountain because we have the idea of gold and of mountain. Just like we have an idea of virtue and of a horse to imagine a virtuous horse. So all the materials that make up thinking are derived from our inward and outward perceptions of the world around us.