The imaginative faculty
idea · 2 works · 2 mentions · 5 anchored passages
القوة المتخيلة · al-quwwah al-mutakhayyilah · fancies and imaginings · the imaginative faculty · their imagination · اوهام وتخيلات · خيالهم
in the texts
Mukhtaṣar fī ʻilm al-nafs al-insānīyah
Al-quwwah al-mutakhayyilah, the imaginative faculty seated in the middle ventricle of the brain, which composes, divides and analyses, strengthens in sleep, and likens meanings to images.
you have already learned (3) that the imaginative faculty (*al-quwwah al-mutakhayyilah*), whose dwelling is the middle of the brain, has for its business composition, division and analysis;
And since it is in the nature of the imaginative faculty that it likens (2) meanings to likenesses, whatever likeness is complete has no need of interpretation (*taʼwīl*), for it has produced [64] the matter as it truly is;
when the imaginative faculty is ruined by an accident befalling the tablet that carries it, so that its operations are thrown into disorder — then if heat prevails over him, he beholds (3) fires and furnaces and kindled kilns;
Kitāb madhāhib al-Aʻrāb wa-falāsifat al-Islām fī al-jinn
The faculty in which intelligibles are said to take form and reach the degree of the sensible, appealed to by Muḥammad ʻAbduh to explain the sick man's true-seeming visions and by the author to dissolve the whole body of jinn reports into fancy.
Yet all that is nothing but fancies and imaginings issuing from the imaginative faculty, upon which the currency of most such reports has stamped traces that are not effaced save by the turning of the days, and by the spreading of the banners of knowledge in every region, so that the veils of fancy are torn apart and the realities take their place in the thoughts of mankind.
For they have conceded that some of their intelligibles take on form in their imagination and reach the degree of the sensible, so that the sick man speaks truly when he says that he sees and hears — indeed that he grapples and wrestles — while in reality nothing of it takes place.