The Logic of Imagination

Abstract

It is often difficult to distinguish between the animals of fable and those of zoology. The sphinx, the chimera, the centaur and the hippogriff belong, and always have belonged to the first category. But animals such as the unicorn have long been catalogued and described in works of natural science. In the seventeenth century, a catalogue such as John Johnston's A Description of the Nature of Four-Footed Beasts, written in Latin, translated into English and published in London in 1678, still distinguishes eight different types with corresponding illustrations. Indeed, a unicorn is no more improbable than a narwhal, whose horn, incidentally, was long thought to be the unicorn's. If we thus confuse real animals with mythological ones, what becomes of the habits, size and appearance given to them by travellers on returning from the far countries where they claim to have seen them?