Imagination and the Self 19

288 diff erent from that which is currently being perceived. Essentially, the imagination allows objects to be held in mind and thereby considered in the absence of their immediate presentation via perception. Th is capacity to hold in mind allows the consideration of relations among the objects of imagination and those of direct experience. Of course, the imagination allows the creation of novel objects and thereby novel action—from simple beginnings in such behavior as object substitution in two-year-olds’ pretend play (McCune, 1995), the imagination blossoms in creative complexity to allow the construction of elaborate fantasies and stories. As the chapters in this handbook amply demonstrate, the imagination is fundamental to human cognitive development (see also, Harris, 2000). Th e idea of the self is tied up with that of personal identity—a notion that has an intellectual history extending back to ancient times. Th is is not the Why include a chapter on the self in a handbook on the imagination? At fi rst blush, the self might be considered to be the one entity that requires no imagination. For Descartes (1637/1985) the existence of the self could be directly known with foundational certainty: Cogito ergo sum —I think, therefore I am. It certainly seems, like Descartes suggests, that we are all directly confronted with our own selfhood on a constant basis. So in what sense might the self depend on the imagination, implying as that term does some creative or constructive cognitive processes? To approach this question, we need to say a few words at the outset fi rst about what we mean by the imagination and then about what kind of entity the self is. In line with many of the chapters in this handbook, we take the imagination to be at heart the capacity of the human mind to bring to consciousness or to represent some mental object that is Abstract