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The human imagination

The human imagination is one of the things we believe separates us from the animals, and different writers and theorists have taken different views of the importance of the imagination. Blaise Pascal points to one of the primary values of the imagination--it allows us to conceive of things we cannot experience directly. One of these things is death, which we do experience eventually but which we must imagine in life. One of the problems Pascal sees in science is that it makes human beings arrogant, as if they were able to control the world in a way they are not. In truth, he finds human beings weak and frail without spiritual support, capable of being completely destroyed by the slightest shift in health:

Man is only a reed, the weakest in nature, but he is a thinking reed. There is no need for the whole universe to take up arms to crush him: a vapour, a drop of water is enough to kill him (Pascal 95).

What gives the human being nobility is the fact that he or she can think and has an awareness of what is happening, even an awareness of death. This is something that no other creature can claim. John Keats explores his poetic imagination in works such as "Ode on a Grecian Urn." Thousands of years ago, human beings in what is now Britain exercised their imagination to create an enduring monument in Stonehenge. Today, we exercise our imagination by reading Keats and marveling at Stonehenge. This is indeed a link between the two, for in "Ode on a Grecian Urn," Keats wonders at how we can look back at a work of art and imagine the actions of its subjects, just as we do today with the poem and the monument.

In the poem "Ode on a Grecian Urn," the poet speaks directly to the reader and describes the scene. There is an immediacy in the way Keats describes the scene and comments on the action. A cursory reading might make one think that he is describing an actual scene he is observing, when in fact what he is doing is d...

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The human imagination. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 09:48, March 28, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1707197.html