“So, if the intermediate world of the stars and planets corresponds to the imaginative faculty of the soul, it is then, through the imagination that we can resonate sympathetically with the heavens; the imagination which will lead to a deeper, more unified kind of knowledge. We must distinguish here from our common use of the word “imagination”, which tends to mean a free-ranging, personal fantasy, and a term understood by Ficino as a means of unifying sense-impressions into images, which are then translated by the mind into thoughts. The mind needs the images in order to grasp the universal concepts to which they point – but then can leave them behind as it moves into the pure contemplation of intellectual activity. Imagination then, plays an essential part in the ascent towards the spiritual union of the intellect, which in the Platonic sense is the place where the soul realises its identity with the divine ideas and indeed finds immortality.”
From Angela Ross’ introduction to her collection of the writings of the renaissance scholar and thinker Marsilio Ficino
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