This ability to see into the interior of reality Bergson called “intuition.” This was, he said, a “kind of intellectual sympathy by which one places oneself within an object in order to coincide with what is unique in it and consequently inexpressible.”
I do not consider imagination to be a mental faculty only.
Here, I follow the Romantics, who took the power of imagination right out of the head and into the cosmos. “Jesus, the Imagination,” exclaimed Blake, by which he meant the cosmic creative force of the world soul, or anima mundi, which produces the images that we perceive—and receive. Images come to us, in reverie, in dreams, in sudden clear insights, and during the long struggles of careful thought. They come to us from the world’s imagination, with which ours corresponds and, according even to such skeptics and rationalists as Hume and Kant, on which our understanding of the world depends. “Without Imagination we should have no knowledge whatsoever, but we are scarcely ever conscious [of this],” said Immanuel Kant.
Once again we see Collingwood’s anti-realism hard at work. Facts do not just present themselves to the inquirer; they become evidence only in relation to the questions the inquirer wishes to ask.
Conservatives, by contrast, began with the nation and built from it a citizenry. As a distinct body of people, the nation was imagined ancestrally or culturally; that is, its people could be treated as sharing origins or as sharing beliefs, attachments, and historical memories. Without one or the other, a people could not make a citizenry. The nation, for conservatives, became accordingly a foundational, social idea.
