With nature never do they wage
A foolish strife; they see
A happy youth and their old age
Is beautiful and free.
Wordsworth: The Fountain.
[109] The phrase imaginative insight is, I believe, true to the spirit of Plato at his best, but it is certainly not true to his terminology. Plato puts the imagination (φαντασία) not only below intuitive reason (νοῦς) and discursive reason or understanding (διάνοια), but even below outer perception (πίστις). He recognizes indeed that it may reflect the operations of the understanding and even the higher reason as well as the impressions of sense. This notion of a superior intellectual imagination was carried much further by Plotinus and the neo-Platonists. Even the intellectual imagination is, however, conceived of as passive. Perhaps no Greek thinker, not even Plato, makes as clear as he might that reason gets its intuition of reality and the One with the aid of the imagination and, as it were, through a veil of illusion, that, in Joubert’s phrase, “l’illusion est une partie inté, grante de la réalité” (Pensées, Titre XI, XXXIX). Joubert again distinguishes (ibid., Titre III, XLVII, LI) between “l’imaginative” which is passive and “l’imagination” which is active and creative (“l’œil de l’âme”). In its failure to bring out with sufficient explicitness this creative rôle of the imagination and in the stubborn intellectualism that this failure implies is to be found, if anywhere, the weak point in the cuirass of Greek philosophy.
[110] See Xenophon, Memorabilia, IV, 16, 3.
[111] Σωφροσύνη.
[112] See his Lettre à d’Alembert.
[113] Varieties of Religious Experience, 387.