Neither is imagination any of the things that are never in error: e.g.
knowledge or intelligence; for imagination may be false.
It remains therefore to see if it is opinion, for opinion may be
either true or false.
But opinion involves belief (for without belief in what we opine
we cannot have an opinion), and in the brutes though we often find
imagination we never find belief. Further, every opinion is
accompanied by belief, belief by conviction, and conviction by
discourse of reason: while there are some of the brutes in which we
find imagination, without discourse of reason. It is clear then that
imagination cannot, again, be (1) opinion plus sensation, or (2)
opinion mediated by sensation, or (3) a blend of opinion and
sensation; this is impossible both for these reasons and because the
content of the supposed opinion cannot be different from that of the
sensation (I mean that imagination must be the blending of the
perception of white with the opinion that it is white: it could
scarcely be a blend of the opinion that it is good with the perception
that it is white): to imagine is therefore (on this view) identical
with the thinking of exactly the same as what one in the strictest
sense perceives. But what we imagine is sometimes false though our
contemporaneous judgement about it is true; e.g. we imagine the sun to
be a foot in diameter though we are convinced that it is larger than
the inhabited part of the earth, and the following dilemma presents
itself.
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