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In the first instance, `` mimesis '' is here used to mean the recalling of experience in terms of vivid images rather than in terms of abstract ideas or conventional designations.

By `` image '' is meant not only a visual presentation, but also remembered sensations of any of the five senses plus the feelings which are immediately conjoined therewith.

This is the primary function of the imagination operating in the absence of the original experiential stimulus by which the images were first appropriated.

Mimesis is the nearest possible thing to the actual re-living of experience, in which the imagining person recovers through images something of the force and depth characteristic of experience itself.

The images themselves, like their counterparts in experience, are not neutral qualities to be surveyed dispassionately ; ;

they are fields of force exerting a unique influence on the sensibilities and a unique relatedness to one another.

They bring an inextricable component of value within themselves, with attractions and repulsions native to their own quality.

As in experience one is seized by given entities and their interrelations and is forced to respond in value feelings to them, so one is similarly seized in the mimetic presentation of images.

Mimesis here is not to be confused with literalism or realism in the conventional sense.

A word taken in its dictionary meaning, a photographic image of a recognizable object, the mere picturing of a `` scene '' tends to lose experiential vividness and to connote such conventional abstractions as to invite neutral reception without the incitement of value feelings.

Similarly experience itself can be conventionalized so that people react to certain preconceived clues for behavior without awareness of the vitality of their experiential field.

A truly vivid imagination moves beyond the conventional recollection to a sense of immediacy.