 According to al-Fārābī the imaginative faculty is very active in human cognitive acts. As outlined above, its function is to retain sense impressions when they are no longer perceived as external stimuli, and also to combine, compose, and even reproduce, those impressions. Following the Aristotelian account, al-Fārābī thinks that the imaginative faculty is intermediate between the sensitive and rational faculties. In fact, in the case of human beings, its function is to provide reason with the impressions attained through the senses, but it also serves the rational faculty in other ways, as will be shown.