From the Imagination of Illusion to the Imagination of Creation The Theophrastus redivivus and Cyrano de Bergerac

Comparing the anonymous treatise Theophrastus redivivus and the novels of Cyrano de Bergerac allows us to highlight a double use of the imagination: understood as illusion, it allow criticizing superstition and religion but, when grasped as both materially and naturally rooted it also acquires an ethical role in the Theophrastus and even, in Cyrano, a scientific role in relation to Cartesian physics, asking whether the imagination cannot be a tool for materialism and, more precisely, mechanism.