Tratado 27 (IV, 3, 30) – INTELLECTUAL CONCEPTIONS ARE NOT ENTIRELY PRESERVED BY IMAGINATION (Guthrie)

INTELLECTUAL CONCEPTIONS ARE NOT ENTIRELY PRESERVED BY IMAGINATION.

30. What about intellectual conceptions? Are they also preserved by imagination? If imagination accompany every thought, and if later it, as it were, preserves its image, we should thus have the memory of the known object; otherwise some other solution will have to be sought. Perhaps reason, whose actualization always accompanies thought, has the function of receiving it and transmitting it to imagination. Indeed, thought is indivisible, and so long as it is not evoked from the depths of intelligence, it remains as it were hidden within it. Reason develops it, and making it pass from the state of thought to that of image, spreads it out as it were in a mirror, for our imagination. That is why we grasp (the thought) only when the soul, which always desires rational thought, has achieved a thought. There is a difference between thought and the perception of thought. We are always thinking, but we do not always perceive our thought. That comes from the fact that the principle that perceives the thoughts also perceives the sensations, and occupies itself with both in turn.