 Imagination is Hobbes’s next topic. His basic thought is that our sensations remain after the act of sensing, but in a weaker way: “after the object is removed, or the eye shut, we still retain an image of the thing seen, though more obscure than when we see it” (Hobbes 1651, 2.2). This is a story about how we form ideas. More generally, imagination has a crucial role in Hobbes’s picture of the workings of the mind. One sort of imagination is what we would now call imagination, “as when from the sight of a man at one time, and of a horse at another, we conceive in our mind a Centaur” (Hobbes 1651, 2.4). That is, we can take the ideas, the faded sensations, from different experiences and combine them together. But Hobbes also connects imagination, and “the faculty of imagining” (Hobbes 1651, 2.10) closely to memory and to understanding. Imagination and memory, Hobbes says, are the same thing, with two names that point to different aspects of the phenomenon of decaying sense. If we want to point to the idea or image itself, we use ‘imagination’, but if we want to point to the decay, we use ‘memory’ (Hobbes 1651, 2.3).