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natural world. This was a belief held earlier by the druids – and by the ancient Stoic philosophers whoalso accepted that the divinity could reside in the ‘mind of man’ and existed in nature, and as ‘Nature’,a divine power that did not exist apart from the physical world. This understanding was unacceptableto Augustine, who saw Pelagius’ beliefs as heretical, and instead preached a dualistic doctrine and theexistence of a transcendent deity. 4The Excursion, however, does not pursue an argument that arrives at any ‘certain’conclusions about theology, or about the mind of Man, Nature or Human Life. It is not dogmatic in itsphilosophising, and presents a philosophical dialogue set in ‘something of a dramatic form’ in whichthe characters speak their minds, and the reader is left to make his or her own conclusions, based onthe ‘evidence’ presented. The characters in the poem ‘invent’ a number of ‘arguments’ that arediscussed, at some length, as each of the eloquent speakers discourse on the matter at hand, addressingeach other, and also the mind of the reader. There is no final resolution to this debate, or disputation,and readers are left to draw their own conclusions from the protracted dialogical display they have just‘witnessed’, in their mind’s eye, their imagination, as they read the poem.In this study I understand the term ‘imagination’ to refer, primarily, to the image-makingfaculty of the mind, the traditional understanding described by Aristotle in De Anima, as I argue thatWordsworth held the same understanding, and never intended the later more ‘Romantic’ definition ofthe word. Aristotle had written that:To the thinking soul images (phantasiae) serve as if they were contents of perception (andwhen it asserts or denies them to be good or bad it avoids or pursues them). That is why thesoul never thinks without an image’. (De Anima III 7. 431)The classical poetic tradition placed much emphasis on painting pictures in the mind’s eye of itsaudience/readers, and I argue that Wordsworth’s understanding of ‘imagination’ was primarilyconcerned with this function. At the same time, our phantasiae – the ‘impressions’ or ‘appearances’ inour minds which can be described also as ‘fancies’ (from the Greek term), or as ‘imaginations’ (fromthe Latin imago), are necessarily tied to sense impressions. In summarising his comments Aristotlemade two further points:No one can learn or understand anything in the absence of sense, and when the mind isactively aware of anything it is necessarily aware of it along with an image; for images arelike sensuous contents except in that they contain no matter’. (III 7. 432)Aristotle also maintained that although concepts were not images, ‘they necessarily involve them’. Histhinking on the matter was both metaphorical and literal, as he tried to account for philosophicaldistinctions as well as psychological experiences, and it is his more empirical concern with the4 Wordsworth’s more educated contemporary readers would have recognised that a description of a priestpresiding over a churchyard in the mountains could be an allusion to Rousseau’s Savoyard vicar whosecontroversial creed had earned Rousseau infamy in Europe among the established Christian orthodoxy.95