Lost Knowledge of the Imagination

The ability to imagine is at the heart of what makes us human. Through our imagination we experience more fully the world both around us and within us. Imagination plays a key role in creativity and innovation.

Until the seventeenth century, the human imagination was celebrated. Since then, with the emergence of science as the dominant worldview, imagination has been marginalized — depicted as a way of escaping reality, rather than knowing it more profoundly — and its significance to our hu...