One of the key facilities of the human mind is imagination. The primary components of the mind include memory, imagination and invention working in harmony to allow the individual to know the world. Through memory of past experience the individual is connected to the "common sense," and largely through the medium of metaphor, original knowledge about the human world is created by using imagination (Arcero, 1997). The "new" scientist looks inward and outward
alternately in building knowledge of the world, and all aspects of culture are important sources of data for understanding, especially myth, poetry and other forms of artistic expression which essentially deal in the rhetoric of metaphor. The collective mind is revealed more through the material representations of its visions than its more "rational" productions. In Vico's words, "For when we wish to give utterance of our understanding of spiritual things, we must seek aid from our imagination to explain them, and like painters, form human images of them." Vico's epistemology is the antithesis of pure reason and logic, and appears at least somewhat related to Eastern mystic religions.
In evolutionary biological terms, we have been designed to dream and imagine, to recombine sense and experience in our minds in various ways (Arcero, 1997). As Vico argues "All that guides imagination is an unwillingness to reduce the mind's uncertainty [what is going
on internally in terms of thought, both conscious and unconscious] by embracing what is familiar to the mind. This sense of ignorance leads us to reach out past our inclination to make experience familiar through the power of the concept and to engage the power of the image. We must reconstruct the human world not through concepts and criteria but as something we can practically see."
Thus our creativity is part of us, part of the constant functioning of the mind, an integral aspect of the process of moment by moment constructing useful edifices of understanding (images) in our minds.
