On Images (1800-1824)

"Former ages thought in terms of images of the imagination, whereas we moderns have concepts. Formerly the guiding ideas of life presented themselves in concrete visual form as divinities, whereas today they are conceptualized. The ancients excelled in creation; our own strength lies rather in destruction, in analysis." (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1806)

"Symbolisms transform the experience into an· idea, and an idea into an image, so that the idea expressed by the image remains always active and unattainable and, even though expressed in all languages, remains unexpressible. Allegory transforms an experience into a concept and a concept into an image, but so that the concept remains always defined and expressible by the image." (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Maximen und Reflexionen., 1809-32)

"Taste is the intermediate faculty which connects the active with the passive powers of our nature, the intellect with the senses; and its appointed function is to elevate the images of the latter, while it realizes the ideas of the former."(Samuel T Coleridge, "On the Principles of Genial Criticism", 1814)

"The imagination […] that reconciling and mediatory power, which incorporating the reason in images of the sense and organizing" (as it were) the flux of the senses by the permanence and self-circling energies of the reason, gives birth to a system of symbols, harmonious in themselves, and consubstantial with the truths of which they are the conductors." (Samuel T Coleridge, "The Statesman's Manual", 1816)

"The imagination […] that reconciling and mediatory power, which incorporating the reason in images of the sense and organizing (as it were) the flux of the senses by the permanence and self-circling energies of the reason, gives birth to a system of symbols, harmonious in themselves, and consubstantial with the truths of which they are the conductors." (Samuel T Coleridge, "The Statesman's Manual", 1816)

"To repeat abstractly, universally, and distinctly in concepts the whole inner nature of the world, and thus to deposit it as a reflected image in permanent concepts always ready for the faculty of reason, this and nothing else is philosophy." (Arthur Schopenhauer, "The World as Will and Representation", 1819)

"The symbol. It is the thing without being the thing, and yet the thing: an image concentrated in the mirror of the mind and yet identical with the object. How inferior is allegory by comparison. Though it may have wit and subtle conceit, it is for the most part rhetorical and conventional. It always improves in proportion to its approach to what we call symbol." (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, "Addenda on the Paintings of Philostratus", 1820)

"Theories are as a rule impulsive reactions of an overhasty understanding which would like to have done with phenomena and therefore substitute images, concepts, or often even just words, in their place. One has an inkling, sometimes even a clear realization, of the fact that a theory is only a dodge. But are not passion and partisanship always on the lookout for dodges? And rightly so, since they are so much in need of them." (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, "Maxims and Reflections", 1822)