Secondary Imagination
The secondary imagination is the conscious, creative faculty by which we participate in the making of reality rather than merely representing it. First articulated by Samuel Taylor Coleridge in Biographia Literaria (1817) and later developed by Owen Barfield, the secondary imagination is the power that “dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to recreate” — that breaks down the given world of perception and reconstitutes it into new unities.
The secondary imagination is not the ability to make things up — the modern reduction to “fantasy” or “fiction-making” — but the capacity to perceive more deeply, to participate more fully in reality, to reveal what is already there but hidden from ordinary perception. It is the faculty by which poets, artists, prophets, and philosophers access the participatory mode of knowing, and by which any person can recover engagement with a living, meaningful world.
Coleridge’s Distinction
Coleridge’s account in Biographia Literaria, Chapter 13, distinguishes three faculties:
Primary Imagination
“The primary Imagination I hold to be the living Power and prime Agent of all human Perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM.”
The primary imagination is the unconscious, universal faculty of perception itself. It is not passive reception of sensory data but active creation — the mind’s participation in making the world it perceives. Every act of perception is, in miniature, a creative act echoing divine creation. This is the foundation of participatory knowing: we do not merely observe reality; we participate in its making through the very act of perceiving it.
Secondary Imagination
“The secondary [imagination] I consider as an echo of the former, co-existing with the conscious will, yet still as identical with the primary in the kind of its agency, and differing only in degree, and in the mode of its operation. It dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to recreate… it struggles to idealize and to unify.”
The secondary imagination is the primary imagination made conscious, made willful, made available to deliberate cultivation. It is the faculty that poets and artists develop, that breaks down and recreates, that synthesizes opposites into organic wholes. Coleridge calls it the “esemplastic power” (from Greek: to shape into one) — the faculty that harmonizes and reconciles opposites.
Fancy Fancy is not imagination at all, but a lower faculty: the mechanical rearrangement of memories and impressions. It operates by “associations of remembrance” — filing and categorizing rather than creating. Fancy is to imagination what computation is to consciousness: it manipulates what is already given but cannot generate the new.
Philosophical Significance
The secondary imagination is fundamentally participatory. It does not fabricate but reveals; it does not represent but engages. This is why Coleridge calls it “identical with the primary in the kind of its agency” — both are creative, participatory faculties. The secondary imagination is the means by which we recover participatory engagement with a world that has been reduced to dead mechanism by Enlightenment rationalism and modern science.
This account anticipates:
- Henry Corbin’s imaginal world — the imagination as a mode of perception that accesses a real, ontological realm
- Owen Barfield’s final participation — the recovery of participatory consciousness through conscious, willful imagination
- John Vervaeke’s participatory knowing — knowing as engagement rather than representation
- Francisco Varela’s enactivism — the view that mind and world co-arise through embodied action, not abstract computation
Connection to Active Imagination
The secondary imagination is philosophically continuous with Jung’s concept of active imagination, though they emerge from different traditions. Jung’s active imagination is a therapeutic method for engaging the unconscious; Coleridge’s secondary imagination is a philosophical account of creative consciousness. But both insist on the reality of the imaginative faculty as an organ of perception, not merely a faculty for producing fictions. Both see the imagination as the means of genuine encounter with something beyond the ego’s control.
For Jung, active imagination is the method by which the conscious ego enters into dialogue with autonomous figures arising from the unconscious. For Coleridge, the secondary imagination is the means by which the poet perceives deeper realities and creates works that reveal those realities to others. The difference is primarily one of context (clinical vs. aesthetic), not of underlying metaphysics.
Connection to Enactivism
The secondary imagination anticipates contemporary enactivist accounts of cognition developed by Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch in The Embodied Mind (1991). Enactivism holds that mind and world co-arise through embodied action — that cognition is not the representation of a pre-given world but the enactment of a world through the organism’s engagement with its environment. This is precisely Coleridge’s claim about the primary imagination: perception itself is creative, not representational.
The secondary imagination is the conscious cultivation of this creative capacity. It is the capacity to dissolve and recreate, to break down the given world of perception and reconstitute it into new unities. This is the same work that enactivism describes at the level of basic cognition, but done consciously and deliberately.
Practical Implications
The secondary imagination is not merely a philosophical concept but a practical capacity that can be cultivated. Coleridge and Barfield both understood this: the imagination is a muscle that can be strengthened through practice. Practices for cultivating the secondary imagination include:
- Poetry and poetic reading — Engaging with language in ways that recover its participatory capacity
- Artistic practice — Drawing, painting, writing, or other creative work that exercises the esemplastic power
- Contemplative practice — Meditation and prayer as methods for quieting the ordinary mind and opening to deeper perception
- Philosophical dialogue — Engaging in dialectical practice that seeks genuine understanding rather than mere argumentation
For practitioners of relational work, the secondary imagination is the capacity that allows one to enter into dialogue with another person not as a fixed object to be analyzed but as a living presence to be encountered. It is the faculty that makes genuine meeting possible, that allows the second person to appear as genuinely new and surprising rather than merely a projection of the first person’s expectations.
Connection to the Meaning Crisis
The loss of access to the secondary imagination is one of the central features of the meaning crisis. Modernity has retained the primary imagination (we still perceive, and perception is still creative) but has largely lost faith in the secondary imagination. We no longer believe that conscious, willful imaginative work can reveal genuine truths about reality. We treat the imagination as the faculty of fiction, of things that are not real, of escapism.
Recovering the secondary imagination — recovering the belief that conscious imaginative work can reveal genuine truths — is one of the central tasks of responding to the meaning crisis. This is why Vervaeke emphasizes practices that cultivate participatory knowing: not more information, but more contact with reality, more genuine engagement with what is real. The secondary imagination is precisely this: the means by which we recover contact with reality that has been lost to abstraction and representation.
Connections
Samuel Taylor Coleridge — The originator of the concept; his account in Biographia Literaria is the primary source.
Owen Barfield — Extended Coleridge’s account into a full genealogy of the evolution of consciousness; his work on language and imagination is continuous with the secondary imagination.
William Blake — Blake’s fourfold vision is the prophetic articulation of the same faculty that Coleridge called the secondary imagination.
The Romantic Tradition — The secondary imagination is the philosophical core of Romantic philosophy.
Participatory Knowing — The secondary imagination is the faculty by which participatory knowing is accessed.
The Imaginal — The secondary imagination is the means by which the imaginal world is accessed.
Henry Corbin — Corbin’s account of the mundus imaginalis is continuous with Coleridge’s account of the secondary imagination.
Active Imagination — Jung’s therapeutic method is continuous with Coleridge’s philosophical account.
Carl Jung — Jung’s active imagination is the clinical articulation of the same faculty.
Francisco Varela — Varela’s enactivism is the scientific articulation of the same insight.
Enactivism — Enactivist accounts of cognition anticipate the secondary imagination at the level of basic perception.
Meaning Crisis — The loss of the secondary imagination is a central feature of the meaning crisis.
Fancy — Coleridge’s contrast term: the mechanical rearrangement of memories versus the creative power of imagination.
Primary Imagination — The unconscious faculty that the secondary imagination echoes and makes conscious.