Goethe's disciplined faculty of re-creating a living process inwardly as exact, moving mental pictures, so that thinking itself begins to perceive.
Exact Sensorial Imagination is the trained inner capacity Goethe brought to the study of living things: after watching a plant or animal closely, the observer rebuilds that growth in the mind, picture by sense-true picture, and lets the images flow forward exactly as the organism itself unfolds. It is imagination held to the discipline of observation, not free reverie, and it lets the knower meet the formative life of nature from within.
Exact Sensorial Imagination in Anthroposophy is the disciplined cognitive faculty Goethe used to study living nature, in which the mind builds inwardly mobile, sense-true mental pictures of a process and lets them transform step by step, so that thinking itself becomes perceptive. Rudolf Steiner gave its theory in A Theory of Knowledge Implicit in Goethe's World-Conception (GA 2, 1886), where he names it a perceptive power of thought that grasps the living type from within rather than fixing it by external proof. It is the working tool of Goethean morphology: the observer who has watched a plant unfold then re-creates that unfolding in imagination, holding each stage exactly. Bound to the brow (third-eye) faculty of inner picturing, it survives today in the Goetheanum Natural Science Section and in landscape and plant study, a counter-method to the detached, measuring gaze of conventional natural science.
In Steiner's Own Words
Therefore it cannot furnish any means of proof but merely suggests the possibility of evolving each special form out of the type. For this reason, the mind must work with far greater intensity in apprehending the type than in grasping the natural law. It must create the content with the form. It must take upon itself an activity which is the function of the senses in inorganic science and which we call perception (Anschauung). The mind itself, therefore, must be perceptive on this higher plane. Our power of judgment must perceive in thinking and think in perceiving.
What it Means Today
The English name "exact sensorial imagination" is not Steiner's; it was minted by the British thinker Henri Bortoft in The Wholeness of Nature: Goethe's Way Toward a Science of Conscious Participation in Nature (Floris Books, 1996). Bortoft, who had studied physics under David Bohm and method under J. G. Bennett, chose the phrase to render Goethe's exakte sinnliche Phantasie without the English overtone of make-believe that the word "fantasy" carries. What GA 2 describes abstractly as a perceptive power of thought, Bortoft restates as a practice you can do: you observe a phenomenon, then run every detail of it again in the mind, watching it move, until the inner picture is as precise as the outer sight was. The discipline keeps imagination tethered to the thing.
This is more than commentary. At the Goetheanum in Dornach, Jochen Bockemühl, who directed the Natural Science Section from 1971 to 1996, made the faculty the backbone of working method. His studies of leaf metamorphosis ask the researcher to hold a whole sequence of leaves in imagination and let one form pass into the next, so the plant's gesture, rather than a fixed specimen, becomes the object known. The point Thalira draws out is the reversal of stance hidden in Steiner's 1886 sentences: ordinary science withdraws the observer to measure from outside, whereas Goethean cognition asks the observer to move inwardly with the life of the thing. Picturing stops being decoration and becomes an organ of knowledge.
Where to Read More
- A Theory of Knowledge Implicit in Goethe's World-Conception, GA 2
- Find at SteinerBooks
- Active Imagination: Jung's Method for Dialogue with the Unconscious
- Pegasus: The Winged Horse and the Flight of Inspired Imagination
- The Stages of Higher Knowledge by Rudolf Steiner: Imagination, Inspiration, Intuition