On Images (-1199)

 "Conscious apprehension seems to exist […] as happens in a mirror-image when the smooth and bright surface is peaceful." (Plotinus, "Enneads", cca. 270 AD)

"In the same way as regards the soul, when that kind of thing in us which mirrors the images of thought and intellect is undisturbed, we see them and know them in a way parallel to sense-perception, along with the prior knowledge that it is intellect and thought that are active. But when this is broken because the harmony of the body is upset, thought and intellect operate without an image, and then intellectual activity takes place without a mind-picture." (Plotinus,"Enneads", cca. 270 AD)

"[...] so external sensation is the image of this perception of the soul, which is in its essence truer and is a contemplation of forms alone without being affected. From these forms, from which the soul alone receives its lordship over the living being, come reasonings, and opinions and noetic acts; and this is precisely where ‘we’ are." (Plotinus, "Enneads", cca. 270 AD)

"The noetic act is without parts and has not, so to speak, come out into the open, but remains unobserved within, but the verbal expression unfolds its content and brings it out of the noetic act into the image making power, and so shows the noetic act as if in a mirror, and this is how there is conscious apprehension and persistence and memory of it." (Plotinus, "Enneads", cca. 270 AD)

"We both are, and know that we are, and delight in our being, and our knowledge of it. Moreover, in these three things no true-seeming illusion disturbs us; for we do not come into contact with these by some bodily sense, as we perceive the things outside of us of all which sensible objects it is the images resembling them, but not themselves which we perceive in the mind and hold in the memory, and which excite us to desire the objects. But, without any delusive representation of images or phantasms, I am most certain that I am, and that I know and delight in this." (Aurelius Augustinus, "The City of God", cca. 400 AD)

"It is told that those who first brought out the irrationals from concealment into the open perished in a shipwreck, to a man. For the unutterable and the formless must needs be concealed. And those who uncovered and touched this image of life were instantaneously destroyed and shall remain forever exposed to the play of the eternal waves." (Proclus Lycaeus, cca 5th century)

"We invoke the imagination and the intervals that it furnishes, since the form itself is without motion or genesis, indivisible and free of all underlying matter, though the elements latent in the form are produced distinctly and individually on the screen of imagination. What projects the images is the understanding; the source of what is projected is the form in the understanding; and what they are projected in is this 'passive nous' that unfolds in revolution about the partlessness of genuine Nous."" (Proclus Lycaeus, "A Commentary on the First Book of Euclid’s Elements", cca 5th century)

"[…] the mind orders nothing by its own motions, but lies merely receptive under the impressions of bodies, reflecting empty images in a mirror in place of reality." (Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius, "The Consolation of Philosophy", cca. 524)

"An image is, after all, a reminder; it is to the illiterate what a book is to the literate, and what the word is to the hearing, the image is to sight. All this is the approach through the senses: but it is with the mind that we lay hold on the image." (John of Damascus, cca. 8th century)

"a [thing’s] likeness often appears and seems to those who perceive it as if the image itself were speaking, as if they heard the words that they held and read." (Avicenna Latinus [Ibn Sina], Liber de Anima, cca. 1014-1027)

"The multiplicity of the soul's occupations with sense-perceptible imaginable forms and connotational images, which are in the form-bearing and the remembering [faculties respectively], with the help of the estimative and cogitative faculty, makes the soul obtain a disposition for the reception of abstractions of them [i.e., of the imaginable forms and images] from the separate substance through some kind of relationship between the two. Observation and inspection of the issue verify this. These occupations [with imaginable forms and images] are those which give [the soul] a perfect disposition that is specific for [the reception of] each individual form, though an intellectual concept may [also] provide this specific [disposition] for [the reception of] another intellectual concept." (Avicenna Latinus [Ibn Sina], "Pointer and Reminders", cca. 1030)

"In the foregoing you will discover a very remarkable thing. God reserved the truth of things, which is the supreme truth, for Himself, but He conceded to His image the formation of images of things at whatever time." (Richard of St. Victor, "Benjamin Major" [aka "The Mystical Ark"], cca 1162)

"Part of the functions of the imaginative faculty is, as you well know, to retain impressions by the senses, to combine them, and chiefly to form images." (Moses Maimonides, "Guide of the Perplexed", 1190)