Hume's view of the imagination and its powers is an amalgam of elements that can be traced back from the systems of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, through Renaissance and medieval philosophy to the Ancients, primarily to Plato's Symposium and Republic and to Aristotle's Poetics and De Anima. Hume's originality in this area lies less in the contributions he makes to the philosophical concept of the imagination per se than in the use he makes of it for his own purposes, employing it as a resource when developing positions on various explananda that compose the body of his philosophical system. As I noted in the preface, however, Hume cannot be said to have any theory or clearly articulated model of the imagination and, for that reason, one has to form some picture of it by extracting the powers he attributes to it from the various contexts in which he applies them. To form such a picture and a terminology to go with it is the aim of this first chapter.

We begin by considering Hume's own use of the term ‘imagination’, before delineating its main principles or powers (terms I use interchangeably) and situating them in the context of Hume's contemporaries and immediate forbears in the early-modern period: its ‘mimetic’ power to copy or represent and its ‘productive’ power to combine ideas and create new ones. At the heart of this latter power, moreover, Hume identifies a hedonistic tendency that inclines the imagination always to seek and make an easy and smooth transition among ideas in order to form a union or complete a whole, from which it derives pleasure. Having delineated its powers, we turn to the errors the imagination is liable to make and to the belief-like states (or lack thereof) that accompany them: ‘mistakes’ under its mimetic power and ‘fictions’ under its productive. In subsequent chapters we will draw on this schema in order to show that, and how Hume's view of the imagination plays a central role in his approach to metaphysics, morals and politics, aesthetics, history, religion and the practice of philosophy.