The Imagination as a Way of Knowing
Coleridge, Barfield, Whitehead, and Segall
A Footnote to Segall
This page is a footnote to an excellent essay, available online, by Matthew David Segall, a leading scholar in Whitehead studies. His essay is "Romantic Imagination and the Recovery of Nature’s Intrinsic Value: Whitehead, Barfield, and Our Crisis of Perception," published in his own website, Footnotes2Plato on December 9, 2005. I encourage you to read his essay first, and this page only as a footnote. I offer it as a series of "lures for reflection" prompted by his ideas. Here are some excerpts from Segall's essay, which set a tone for the lures.
Re-Educating the Senses
Imagination, for Whitehead, is not a decorative add-on to a finished empirical picture but rather the faculty that allows us to reconfigure the categories through which we understand experience. He is explicit that imagination has a legitimate and necessary role to play in bringing us into more intimate contact with reality.
Conscious Participation in divine Imagination
If we read Coleridge through Whitehead, primary imagination corresponds to the primordial creativity at the heart of the world, what Whitehead would call the primordial nature of God. Secondary imagination corresponds to our conscious participation in that creativity. Fancy, meanwhile, fits the role of a purely representational model of mind restricted to the sense-bound intellect.
What Coleridge, Barfield, Steiner, Goethe, and Whitehead are all saying is that imagination is not mere fancy. It is not just a brain mechanism limited to recombining sensory impressions. Rather, imagination is the way the deeper creative ground of the cosmos becomes conscious of itself in and through us. What we experience consciously as imagination is the same formative power that grows plants, shapes bones, and ignites the stars.
A Renewed Metaphysical Imagination
Whitehead and Barfield help us see that our current predicament is rooted in a metaphysical confusion and a perceptual deformation: the bifurcation of nature; the contraction of consciousness; the despotism of the eye; and the reduction of imagination to mere fancy. Within this wounded cosmovision, nature is mute and valueless, and human beings are defined primarily as rational consumers and producers. Under such conditions, the relentless exploitation of ecosystems and workers should not be considered a surprising aberration but an expected outcome.
To respond adequately, we need more than better scientific models or economic policies. We need a renewed metaphysical imagination. This does not mean denying science. It means refusing to handicap science with a mutilated picture of perception. It means recognizing that imagination is not an optional aesthetic supplement to real knowledge, but a cognitive power that allows us to come into conscious relation with the more-than-human world.
The Imagination as
a Way of Knowing
It is fashionable in our time, and rightly so, to encourage ourselves and others to be "mindful" in the present moment. That is, to be lovingly attentive to our surroundings: to the presence of other people, to the rest of the natural world, to the cultural and emotional climates. To this the Romantic movements of the nineteenth centuries, in England and Germany, offer an invitation to be "imaginative" in the present moment, and to let this imagination be part of our mindfulness. And here, thinkers like Owen Barfield, as he interprets Samuel Taylor Coleridge, can be our guides. And perhaps Whitehead, too.
When you immerse yourself in Barfield’s insights on Coleridge and integrate Whitehead’s philosophical perspective, you begin to see a river not just as a scientific phenomenon, but as a living energy field, alive with rhythms and possibilities. You trust that this imaginative perception is just as ontologically revealing—perhaps even more so—than the purely scientific reflection. It is not at odds with science; it is simply more than science. In this way, your imaginative engagement isn’t just a layer on top of reality; it becomes a profound mode of knowing the world in its depth and vibrancy.
And this same imaginative lens applies when you turn inward and observe your own thought processes. You see your own mind as a flow of living creativity, not merely mechanical or logical, but part of the same vibrant field of reality. In doing so, you realize that this imaginative perception isn’t just an add-on; it’s a fundamental, ontologically rich way of engaging with both the world and your own mind.
Additionally and importantly, you begin to see other people, friends and foes, in an empathetic way, sensitive to their own feelings and perspectives, knowing that you are in some deep way 'at one' with them even as they have their uniqueness and individuality, worthy of respect. You then wonder if, in this way, Imagination itself might be one of the world's best hopes, and perhaps a key to understanding the very heart of reality - a heart that includes more that matter in motion, but also feelings in motion. Indeed, you sense that whatever God is - whatever the Soul of the universe is - then perhaps that Soul is among other things Imagination with an upper case I. And that another name for this Imagination is Love. Not a sentimental love that is about tenderness alone, but also a wild love that is creative and unbounded, and very, very beautiful.
When you immerse yourself in Barfield’s insights on Coleridge and integrate Whitehead’s philosophical perspective, you begin to see a river not just as a scientific phenomenon, but as a living energy field, alive with rhythms and possibilities. You trust that this imaginative perception is just as ontologically revealing—perhaps even more so—than the purely scientific reflection. It is not at odds with science; it is simply more than science. In this way, your imaginative engagement isn’t just a layer on top of reality; it becomes a profound mode of knowing the world in its depth and vibrancy.
And this same imaginative lens applies when you turn inward and observe your own thought processes. You see your own mind as a flow of living creativity, not merely mechanical or logical, but part of the same vibrant field of reality. In doing so, you realize that this imaginative perception isn’t just an add-on; it’s a fundamental, ontologically rich way of engaging with both the world and your own mind.
Additionally and importantly, you begin to see other people, friends and foes, in an empathetic way, sensitive to their own feelings and perspectives, knowing that you are in some deep way 'at one' with them even as they have their uniqueness and individuality, worthy of respect. You then wonder if, in this way, Imagination itself might be one of the world's best hopes, and perhaps a key to understanding the very heart of reality - a heart that includes more that matter in motion, but also feelings in motion. Indeed, you sense that whatever God is - whatever the Soul of the universe is - then perhaps that Soul is among other things Imagination with an upper case I. And that another name for this Imagination is Love. Not a sentimental love that is about tenderness alone, but also a wild love that is creative and unbounded, and very, very beautiful.
Whitehead and Coleridge
The Imagination then I consider either as primary, or secondary. 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 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: or where this process is rendered impossible, yet still at all events it struggles to idealize and to unify. It is essentially vital, even as all objects (as objects) are essentially fixed and dead.
FANCY, on the contrary, has no other counters to play with, but fixities and definites. The fancy is indeed no other than a mode of memory emancipated from the order of time and space; while it is blended with, and modified by that empirical phaenomenon of the will, which we express by the word Choice. But equally with the ordinary memory the Fancy must receive all its materials ready made from the law of association.
- Biographia Literaria, by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
In Whitehead's philosophy an 'imaginative feeling" is a conceptual feeling that entertains unrealized possibilities and introduces novelty into the becoming of an actual occasion, relatively free from determination by the past. A conceptual feeling is a feeling of a possibility. This possibility can be highly abstract; a "pure potentiality" which Whitehead calls an eternal object, and which, considered in itself, may have no relevance to any particular state of affairs in the world or universe. Or it can be an "impure potentiality" which is a pure potentiality that is linked with, and relevant to, a particular state of affairs, in the form of a "proposition" or "lure for feeling." An imaginative feeling is a feeling of such a proposition: for example, a feeling of how the world could be in the future, even if it has never been that way in the past.
Whitehead describes God as the Poet of the world and thus as including, within the divine life itself, imaginative feelings. This image suggests that the word God names an ongoing activity—deep within the divine life—that is creative in a positive sense, generative of novelty. Coleridge's speculations above suggest that this activity is always already within us even as it remains beyond us, operative at a level deeper than conscious will. We are always imagining with God, and in God, at a deep level of our lives. This same activity may be present in, and thus underlie, the whole of creation, such that “the world” itself can be understood as an expression of it. This, I suggest, is what Coleridge means by the primary imagination.
The secondary imagination consists in those acts in which we, as agents in our own right, cooperate with this creative activity—sometimes with greater resonance, sometimes with less. At its heart is an openness to novel possibilities that are not merely prefigured by, or derived from, memories of the past. Fancy builds from what has been; the secondary imagination responds to a call from the future. Both are valuable, but the secondary imagination uniquely echoes the creative activity of the divine Poet.
This way of thinking opens up a distinctive, explicitly Whiteheadian understanding of faith in God. Faith can be understood as a way of cooperating with the Poet of the world—God in God’s primordial nature—whose activity consists in the imaginative envisagement of possibilities relevant to each moment of becoming. This divine activity functions as the primary imagination underlying the whole of the universe, offering lures for feeling that invite creatures toward richer, more harmonious forms of experience.
To live by faith, on this view, is to respond to these lures through imaginative feeling, exercising what Coleridge called the secondary imagination in and through the process of concrescence. Faith is thus a mode of participation in the poetic activity of God, a way of allowing unrealized possibilities to inform our decisions and actions rather than merely repeating patterns inherited from the past.
This participation should not be understood narrowly as a matter of “seeing” with the eyes alone. In Whitehead’s terms, imaginative feeling can be conjoined with all modes of feeling—visual, auditory, tactile, kinesthetic, and affective—as well as with nonsensory intuitions, such as empathic prehensions in which we feel the feelings of others. In any case, the life of faith has two inseparable sides: an openness to fresh possibilities lured by God, and a way of feeling the world as it actually is, re-envisioned through imaginative feeling and ordered toward a richer satisfaction.
Barfield on Coleridge
The Organic Whole
"You Cannot Really Say One Thing Correctly
without Saying Everything"
“So, to Coleridge, the whole world of thought—even logic itself—was an organic structure. Now he himself conceived of an organic whole in which each part implies or contains every other part, in which each part, as it were, contains the whole. Thus, the moment his mind began to undertake the necessary analytical work, the splitting up into parts which is requisite for the purpose of discursive expression, Coleridge began to feel that he was denying his own intuition. As soon as he had separated out a part of his system for the purpose of giving expression to it, he would feel with anxiety the necessity of trying to show there and then how that same part implied the whole. His extraordinarily unifying mind was too painfully aware that you cannot really say one thing correctly without saying everything. He was rightly afraid that there would not be time to say everything before going on to say the next thing, or that he would forget to do so afterwards. His incoherence of expression arose from the coherence of what he wanted to express. It was a sort of intellectual stammer.”¹
- Owen Barfield, "The Philosophy of Coleridge" in Romanticism Comes of Age, Anthroposophical Publishing Company, London, 1944, p. 149
For Whitehead, and as Barfield interprets Coleridge, everything is profoundly interconnected. It's not just that parts form a whole, but that each part actually contains the whole within it. Each actual entity is a "concrescence of the universe." This means that if you really want to understand any one specific thing—whether it’s an idea, a feeling, a piece of information, or something more tangible like a person, a plant, an animal, a star, a hill, a river, or a tree—you have to see how that one thing is woven into the entire fabric of reality. And likewise, you have to see how the whole of reality is reflected back in that one thing. In other words, Coleridge is right: to truly say one thing fully, you have to, in a sense, speak of everything. (Jay McDaniel)
Thinking is Part of Nature, Too
I will not carry this any further. I merely wanted to give a rough indication of the way in which the nature of Coleridge’s thought enabled him to approach nature from within...What I am giving is the sketch of a sketch. Coleridge was not, in general, a close observer of nature, as Wordsworth and his sister were, or as Goethe was. But he was a very close observer of his own thought-processes. And this initiated him into the heart of nature. So that he was able to know nature by mentally recreating her.
- Owen Barfield, "The Philosophy of Coleridge" in Romanticism Comes of Age, Anthroposophical Publishing Company, London, 1944, p. 162
We ourselves are what Whitehead and process philosophers call concrescing subjects. As such subjects, we are made up of these momentary occasions of experience, each one a process of concrescence—of gathering and integrating the influences of the world into a new moment of experience. By looking at our own thought processes, we’re seeing the universe in miniature—a universe of concrescing subjects all interconnected. If we an to understand the heart of reality, can, like Wordsworth and Goethe, begin with the natural world, but we can also begin with our own thought processes. (Jay McDaniel)
The Fallacy of the Passive Onlooker
Goethe was a scientist before he was a philosopher. He tells us himself that he had “ never thought about thinking,” Coleridge was a philosopher (and also, in the true sense of the word, a psychologist) first ; he interested himself in science only incidentally and on one occasion. He spent most of his life thinking about thinking.
The truth at the core of things is one and the same from whatever direction it is approached, and it is particularly interesting to observe that these two thinkers, starting from opposite poles, Goethe from the pole of Nature and Coleridge from the pole of Pure Reason or Spirit, meet. Both of them overcame (and hence the degree of misunderstanding which they have encountered) the arch fallacy of their age and our own, the fallacy that mind is exclusively subjective , or, to put it more crudely, that the mind is something which is shut up in a sort of box called the brain, the fallacy that the mind of man is a passive onlooker at the processes and phenomena of nature, in the creation of which it neither takes nor has taken any part, the fallacy that there are many separate minds, but no such thing as Mind.
- Owen Barfield, "The Philosophy of Coleridge" in Romanticism Comes of Age, Anthroposophical Publishing Company, London, 1944, p. 150
It can be tempting to think that human subjectivity—or the subjectivity of any creature—is neatly boxed in, for example in the human brain. But from a Whiteheadian and a Coleridgean perspective—as Barfield interprets it—our subjectivity isn’t confined like that. Instead, it spreads out like a field. To imagine it as boxed in is to fall into what Whitehead would call the fallacy of simple location. In other words, our minds are always more than just our brains. Our lived subjectivity includes what’s outside our bodies as part of our own internal experience. Thus, we’re not just passive observers of the world around us. Those phenomena and processes of nature become part of our very subjectivity.
The Creative Imagination
“What, then, is the really characteristic thing about this creative imagination for which the Romantics claimed so much? How does it differ from any other human faculty and experience? I think the true differentia of imagination is that the subject should be somehow merged or resolved into the object. Talent may copy Nature, but genius claims to ‘create’ after the fashion of Nature herself. Nature takes the pen from its hand and writes; and there are many phrases of the same nature. Thus, Coleridge called imagination organic. It was ‘the repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM.’ I think it was Lamb who spoke of the soul being ‘resolved into the element which it contemplates,’ and the same feeling confronts us in Adonais:
He is a portion of that loveliness
Which once he made more lovely.
In a word, imagination involves a certain disappearance of the sense of ‘I’ and ‘Not I.’ It stands before the object and feels, ‘I am That.’”
- Owen Barfield, "The Philosophy of Coleridge" in Romanticism Comes of Age, Anthroposophical Publishing Company, London, 1944, p. 162
In Whitehead’s philosophy, imagination plays a profound role wherever intellectual feelings are involved. It’s the process of taking what’s received from the past actual world, imagining new possibilities for how they can be appropriated in the immediate present of experience, and adding that fresh element. This imaginative activity is at the heart of reasoning—especially synthetic reasoning—and really at the heart of all experience. What’s more, it’s also central to the divine reality. As the divine receives influences from the world, it transmutes them into whatever beauty is possible, weaving them into a kind of ongoing tapestry of love. When we do this imaginative work, we’re not just using our minds; we’re actually imitating and participating in that cosmic activity of the divine.
Beyond the Despotism of the Eye
Imagination need not be restricted to vision or to the production of mental images. Indeed, for Barfield, "ideas" are not images in the mind. They are essential energies. The imagination, including its sense of possibility, can be conjoined with all the senses: we can listen imaginatively, touch imaginatively, smell imaginatively, taste imaginatively, and move imaginatively. In each case, imagination deepens perception by attuning us to the qualitative and expressive character of what is encountered, allowing the world to be felt not merely as an object of sensation but as a field of lived meaning.
From a pan-experientialist perspective—such as that developed by Whitehead—this imaginative attunement is not uniquely human. Other creatures, too, experience their worlds in ways that integrate feeling, perception, and responsiveness, shaped by sensory capacities different from our own and often enriched by modes of experience to which we, lacking those senses, have no direct access. Imagination, in this expanded sense, names not a private mental faculty but a mode of participatory feeling through which diverse forms of life inhabit and respond to their worlds. Thus we can speak of, and wonder about, the imaginations of insects, fish, plants, and stars, and, with Goethe, consider their own activities as the self-expression of imaginative activities, lured, in their ways, by the Soul of the universe.
A recognition of the contingencies of human senses can also help us move past what Matthew David Segall calls the "Despotism of the Eye." This is the controlling mindset that accompanies excessive attention to objects of visual perception when reduced to what Whitehead calls "presentational immediacy," amid which they are bare objects to be analyzed, devoid of energies of their own and intrinsic value.
When this despotism reigns, we see the world as present-at-hand (Heidegger's phrase) but not as an evolving nexus of living organisms, each with their own spontaneity, self-creativity, and value for themselves. Indeed, we often see our fellow humans this way, too, especially our "enemies" - as bare 'its' devoid of dignity and value. The need, as Segall explains, is to re-educate our senses, the eyes included, by recognizing imaginative forms of knowing that are not about controlling the world, but about intimacy with the world. A first step in this shift toward intimacy is to move beyond a vision-bound epistemology in which things are known only by 'seeing' them as merely 'present' for our purposes. This shift is toward what Whitehead and Barfield would call a participatory epistemology, in which all of our senses, our eyes included, are avenues for practical negotiations of our relations to the world, but also receptacles for more intimate forms of respect, care, and love.
From a pan-experientialist perspective—such as that developed by Whitehead—this imaginative attunement is not uniquely human. Other creatures, too, experience their worlds in ways that integrate feeling, perception, and responsiveness, shaped by sensory capacities different from our own and often enriched by modes of experience to which we, lacking those senses, have no direct access. Imagination, in this expanded sense, names not a private mental faculty but a mode of participatory feeling through which diverse forms of life inhabit and respond to their worlds. Thus we can speak of, and wonder about, the imaginations of insects, fish, plants, and stars, and, with Goethe, consider their own activities as the self-expression of imaginative activities, lured, in their ways, by the Soul of the universe.
A recognition of the contingencies of human senses can also help us move past what Matthew David Segall calls the "Despotism of the Eye." This is the controlling mindset that accompanies excessive attention to objects of visual perception when reduced to what Whitehead calls "presentational immediacy," amid which they are bare objects to be analyzed, devoid of energies of their own and intrinsic value.
When this despotism reigns, we see the world as present-at-hand (Heidegger's phrase) but not as an evolving nexus of living organisms, each with their own spontaneity, self-creativity, and value for themselves. Indeed, we often see our fellow humans this way, too, especially our "enemies" - as bare 'its' devoid of dignity and value. The need, as Segall explains, is to re-educate our senses, the eyes included, by recognizing imaginative forms of knowing that are not about controlling the world, but about intimacy with the world. A first step in this shift toward intimacy is to move beyond a vision-bound epistemology in which things are known only by 'seeing' them as merely 'present' for our purposes. This shift is toward what Whitehead and Barfield would call a participatory epistemology, in which all of our senses, our eyes included, are avenues for practical negotiations of our relations to the world, but also receptacles for more intimate forms of respect, care, and love.
Romanticism (Comes of Age)
In Romanticism Comes of Age, as he discusses Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Barfield builds upon Coleridge’s understanding of the imagination to propose a way of thinking and living in the world that, he believes, can help Romanticism “come of age” both in his own time and in ours. This maturation occurs through the deliberate cultivation of the art of imagining within our own lives. Imagination, on this view, is not merely a subjective process taking place in the mind, nor a faculty concerned with private images or fantasies. It is not reducible to the intellectual analysis, whose proper task is analysis, abstraction, and the manipulation of concepts. Rather, as noted above, imagination is a mode of perception and attunement to the world itself and (as Coleridge's approach makes clear) to the deepest nature of our own selves.
There are two primary ways in which the power of imagination can impress itself upon us. One is through attentive observation of nature; the other is through careful observation of the activity of our own minds. According to Barfield, Wordsworth and Goethe tended toward the first approach, finding imaginative insight through close engagement with the natural world, while Coleridge leaned decisively toward the second, discovering in the disciplined observation of thought itself a path into the heart of nature.
Through imagination, we come to apprehend the essences of what we perceive: essences present in insects and flowers, rivers and mountains, planets and stars, and in ourselves. These essences are not merely the “objects” of detached observation or analytical inspection, as though they were inert items standing over against a knowing subject. They are living realities - activities filled with subjectivity - that disclose themselves only through participatory awareness. To imagine, in this Coleridgean and Barfieldian sense, is not to impose meaning upon the world but to enter into a form of knowing in which meaning is revealed through relationship.
Along the way our sense of ourselves as isolated, solitary subjects begins to fall away. We awaken instead to the world as an organic and evolving whole in which we already participate—a world whose becoming includes our own acts of perception and understanding. At the same time, we come to recognize that imagination itself mirrors—or participates in—the divine mind, serving as a finite echo of the creative Logos through which the world is continually being known from within. This Logos is the Soul of the universe whose very body is the universe itself. It is Imagination with an upper case I. It is filled with zest, with desire, and thinks Whitehead, with a tender care that nothing be lost.
¹ Barfield’s engagement with Coleridge is not limited to Romanticism Comes of Age. He treats Coleridge explicitly and at greater length in What Coleridge Thought (London: Oxford University Press, 1971), and discusses Coleridge’s ideas more indirectly—especially in relation to imagination, participation, and the evolution of consciousness—in works such as Poetic Diction (London: Faber and Faber, 1928; rev. ed. 1962) and Saving the Appearances (London: Faber and Faber, 1957).
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) was an English poet, literary critic, philosopher, and theologian, and a central figure of the British Romantic movement. Best known for poems such as The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan, Coleridge was also a profound theorist of imagination, which he understood not as mere fancy but as a primary, living power of human perception that participates in the creative life of reality itself. Deeply influenced by German idealism, Neoplatonism, and Christian theology, he sought to reconcile poetry, philosophy, and faith. In works such as Biographia Literaria, Coleridge articulated his influential distinction between the primary and secondary imagination and argued that true imagination discloses the dynamic, living unity of subject and object, mind and world.
Owen Barfield (1898–1997) was a British philosopher of language, meaning, and consciousness whose work extended and reinterpreted Coleridge’s insights for the modern world. A close friend of C. S. Lewis and a member of the wider circle associated with the Inklings, Barfield argued that meaning is not merely projected onto the world by human minds but arises through a participatory relationship between consciousness and reality. In books such as Poetic Diction, Saving the Appearances, and What Coleridge Thought, he developed the idea that human consciousness itself evolves historically, with modern “literal” or abstract thinking emerging from—and obscuring—earlier forms of participatory awareness. Barfield’s lifelong project was to show how imagination can be consciously cultivated as a way of reuniting thought, perception, and meaning in a disenchanted age.
Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947) was an English mathematician, philosopher, and metaphysician best known for developing process philosophy, a comprehensive vision of reality centered on becoming, relation, and experience rather than static substance. After early work in mathematics and logic—most notably Principia Mathematica (coauthored with Bertrand Russell)—Whitehead turned to philosophy, producing major works such as Science and the Modern World, Process and Reality, and Adventures of Ideas. He rejected the mechanistic worldview of modern materialism and proposed instead that the fundamental units of reality are events or “actual occasions,” each characterized by feeling, creativity, and relationality. For Whitehead, imagination, value, and experience are woven into the very fabric of the cosmos, and God is understood not as an omnipotent ruler but as a persuasive lure toward richer forms of harmony and beauty. His thought has been deeply influential in theology, ecology, philosophy of science, and contemporary process and relational worldviews.