‘Pursued Thoughts’: Imagination, Raving and Meditation in the Early Boyle

One focus of Boyle’s early devotional reflections was a moral-epistemic regimen which diagnosed the sins and vices of the mind, including ‘raving’ and other types of unruly thinking, and devised remedial practices, such as meditation and self-examination. In this chapter, I show that the core psychological hinge of this regimen was the faculty of the imagination. ‘Raving’ is indeed a fruit of the feverish imagination. However, the passage to the meditative mind does not consist in discarding the work of the imagination, but rather in taming and reorienting it. The freedom, mobility, extravagance and vividness of thinking commanded by the imagination have their dangers but also their holy uses. The paper draws out a Reformed context for this theme and argues that the conversion of the imagination performed in the passage from the raving to the meditative mind is accomplished by means of tools specific to early modern rhetoric and logic.