In our efforts to imagine animal minds, there will always be a tension between sympathetic imagination and rational skepticism.
Mullâ Sadrâ calls intellectual knowledge "non-instrumental" (al-ghayr al-âlî), because it accrues to the soul not by the instruments of sense perception, imagination, and rational argumentation, but by the soul's conformity with reason or intelligence ('aql), which, in its fullest reality, is nothing but the shining light of the Real.
Still, the scrolls have a hold on the religious imagination that transcends the rational.
It is the opposite of the grotesque and the visionary, modes in which unruly imagination runs riot over rational wisdom.
Yet the act of organization that the constellations represent proved to be essential to rational science, giving us mathematics through imagination.
This free, rational and ironic use of the imagination — a disenchanted form of enchantment — provides the possibility for greater diversity, tolerance and change than ever existed in the medieval period.
However, the alternative to rational calculation is not sloppy emotion but imagination, which shapes emotion into drama.
("How often was he appalled by some shrub covered with snow, which, like a sheeted spectre, beset his very path!") In dance, the dreams and terrors gallop forth, a kind of imagination incarnate, unencumbered by the rational quality of words.
The "second intellect" (actually the third hypostasis of intellect) is a faculty of the rational soul, which via sense perception and imagination (the "internal senses") conveys information to the higher hypostasis in the rational soul.
While sense perception and imagination belong to the non-rational soul, opinion forms the lowest level of rationality.
If we are going to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on human space travel, however, we need to have a rational plan, and one that can excite the imagination of the next generation of would-be scientists and explorers.
