"Leviathan" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hobbes Thomas)

exercise their virtue by which they are visible in the day than in the
night. But because amongst many strokes which our eyes, ears, and
other organs receive from external bodies, the predominant only is
sensible; therefore the light of the sun being predominant, we are not
affected with the action of the stars. And any object being removed
from our eyes, though the impression it made in us remain, yet other
objects more present succeeding, and working on us, the imagination of
the past is obscured and made weak, as the voice of a man is in the
noise of the day. From whence it followeth that the longer the time
is, after the sight or sense of any object, the weaker is the
imagination. For the continual change of man's body destroys in time
the parts which in sense were moved: so that distance of time, and
of place, hath one and the same effect in us. For as at a great
distance of place that which we look at appears dim, and without
distinction of the smaller parts, and as voices grow weak and
inarticulate: so also after great distance of time our imagination
of the past is weak; and we lose, for example, of cities we have seen,
many particular streets; and of actions, many particular
circumstances. This decaying sense, when we would express the thing
itself (I mean fancy itself), we call imagination, as I said before.
But when we would express the decay, and signify that the sense is
fading, old, and past, it is called memory. So that imagination and
memory are but one thing, which for diverse considerations hath
diverse names.

Much memory, or memory of many things, is called experience.
Again, imagination being only of those things which have been formerly
perceived by sense, either all at once, or by parts at several
times; the former (which is the imagining the whole object, as it
was presented to the sense) is simple imagination, as when one
imagineth a man, or horse, which he hath seen before. The other is
compounded, when from the sight of a man at one time, and of a horse
at another, we conceive in our mind a centaur. So when a man
compoundeth the image of his own person with the image of the
actions of another man, as when a man imagines himself a Hercules or
an Alexander (which happeneth often to them that are much taken with
reading of romances), it is a compound imagination, and properly but a
fiction of the mind. There be also other imaginations that rise in
men, though waking, from the great impression made in sense: as from
gazing upon the sun, the impression leaves an image of the sun
before our eyes a long time after; and from being long and
vehemently attent upon geometrical figures, a man shall in the dark,
though awake, have the images of lines and angles before his eyes;
which kind of fancy hath no particular name, as being a thing that
doth not commonly fall into men's discourse.

The imaginations of them that sleep are those we call dreams. And
these also (as all other imaginations) have been before, either
totally or by parcels, in the sense. And because in sense, the brain
and nerves, which are the necessary organs of sense, are so benumbed