Imagination, a Tool to Acquire Knowledge

The faculty of imagination changes sensible things to imaginal ones in an ascending motion, and intelligibles to imaginations in a descending motion. Thus, as an epistemic tool, imagination plays a key role to store forms taken by the common sense from [external] senses. Ontologically, the world of imagination and ideas is a level of the levels of existence; and epistemologically, imagination is an intermediate between two existential realms of man; and it is a faculty from among man's inner faculties as well as a manifestation of "the Fashioner". If connected to the discontiguous imagination and purified, imagination will be able to intuit immaterial things of the world of imagination, and will find many kinds of knowledge, and its realization in the human soul will be clearer, and true. In the Holy Quran, imagination is a faculty from among man's inner faculties and plays an important role in the world of dreams and intuition of the truths of being.