Renaissance Theories of Internal Senses

Abstract

The standard Renaissance accounts of the internal senses often followed medieval sources, such as Albert the Great’s De homine and the anonymous Summa naturalium, maintaining that there are five internal senses: common sense and imagination, which are located in the front ventricle of the brain; fantasy and the estimative power in the middle ventricle; and memory in the posterior one. According to these accounts, common sense has a variety of functions, such as comparing between the objects of different senses and the consciousness of perception. Imagination is the faculty which retains the sensible forms received by common sense. Fantasy or the cogitative power, as it was sometimes called, is the faculty which composes and divides sensible forms and intentions, yielding new images. Intentions are evaluative features that the estimative power elicits from the sensible forms. The estimative power also provides a kind of judgement on the level of sense cognition and accounts thereby for instinctive reactions of avoidance or trust. Memory is the faculty which retains sensible forms and intentions. It differs from imagination because it retains sensible forms with knowledge of the past.