1 Substance of a lecture given to the Leicester Aquinas Society, June 17th, 1935.

2 Note: the reader must be careful to distinguish what is here called the imagination from the imagination or phantasia of the scholastics, the “sort of storehouse of sense-impressions” as St. Thomas calls it (I, 78, 4). This latter is a sensory faculty; its images are material images; its function is to take part as instrument of the mind, in the process of acquiring knowledge. But the human mind can do more than, acquire knowledge. In a manner of speaking it chews up and digests its sense-impressions, and a new, hitherto non-existent “image” is created. So that when we say a man has “imagination” we mean not merely that he registers his sense-impressions but that he creates images; and when a child draws or a poet “makes,” likeness to sensory appearance is the least important as well as the least obvious character of their productions. Now this creative “image” is not purely sensory; on the other hand, it is, as Maritain points out, not a purely intellectual form either, it concerns “not only the intellect but the imagination and sensibility of the artist … and for this reason cannot be expressed in concepts” (Art et Scolastique, p. 278). This special use of the intellect, imagination and senses, then, is here called, in accordance with common English usage, “imagination.”

3 The humanitarian is that kind of person who accepts the degradation of humanity which Industrialism involves, but wishes to ameliorate the lot of tie degraded victims by factory legislation, the protection of children, the provision of safety regulations where machinery is used, the provision of medical clinics and uplifting entertainments, the spreading of contraceptive instruction and apparatus among what she calls the “working classes.”