The first stage of supersensible cognition above ordinary sense knowledge, in which the soul perceives spiritual realities as vivid living pictures rather than as material objects.
Imagination, in Rudolf Steiner's anthroposophy, names the first opened organ of higher cognition. It is not ordinary creative fancy. It is a precise technical term for picture-perception (Bilderschau): the I forms images that arise without any sensory object, yet are as vivid and true as sense impressions, drawn from the spiritual world rather than from matter. Imagination is followed by Inspiration and completed by Intuition.
In Steiner's Own Words
Pictures, then, of a spiritual kind are first encountered by the student on his progress into higher worlds; and the reality to which these pictures correspond is actually within himself. He should be far enough advanced to refrain from desiring reality of a more robust kind at this initial stage, and to regard these pictures as timely. He will soon meet something quite new within this world of pictures. His lower self is before him as a mirrored image; but from within this image there appears the true reality of his higher self. Out of the picture of his lower personality the form of the spiritual ego becomes visible. Then threads are spun from the latter to other and higher spiritual realities.
What it Means Today
The Wikipedia entry on imagination treats the word as a faculty of creative fancy, the same family as daydream, metaphor, and artistic invention. That conflation is exactly what Steiner sets aside. In anthroposophy, Imagination is a technical name for a definite step in cognition, on the same epistemic level as sensation in ordinary life. It does not produce fictions. It perceives. The picture is the form in which a spiritual reality first becomes visible to a trained I, in the same way that colour is the form in which a physical reality first becomes visible to the eye.
The closest cousin in nineteenth-century thought is Goethe's exact sensorial imagination, the disciplined inner picture by which the botanist follows a plant through its metamorphoses without losing fidelity to what is actually there. Steiner inherits Goethe's discipline and extends it past the sense world. The training is concrete. The student practises meditation on a single living image, holds it in the soul under quiet self-observation, then dissolves it. Over time, the soul learns to receive pictures that no longer come from memory but from the spiritual environment itself. The eight-membered preparation, the six subsidiary exercises, the patient review of the day in reverse all serve this single shift, from picturing what one knows to perceiving what one does not yet know. Imagination is the gate. Inspiration and Intuition are what lies on the other side. Healthy fantasy is the everyday seed of the higher Imagination, the soul's native image-making power. The path toward Imagination opens through reverence, the soul-mood that turns knowledge into devotion. The first stage of spiritual cognition, Imagination, works unconsciously as artistic imagination. The descent to the Mothers is a picture of Imagination; see the Mothers. The exact Imagination of spiritual science renews consciously what atavistic clairvoyance once gave instinctively. The methodological hallmark of all such research is body-free cognition.
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