Insight and Imagination

One notable characteristic of most, if not all, moments of Insight is that the aura that seems to surround it tends to wear off, sooner or later. At that point, Peirce's theory of Insight seems accurate--that it is a moment of hypothesis-formation. For, once formed, an hypotheses then needs to be tested, so, once the formation is complete, whatever is compelling about the formative phase of the process gives way to uncertainty. So, it is not the self-evident truthfulness of the object of Insight that is the source of the power of the moment. Hence, it instead must be some subjective process that rivets the subject, and the source of that process is most likely Imagination. Kant's discovery of the Productive Imagination, and its contribution to Empirical Reality , offers an explanation of how a subjective process can become ingredient in objective experience, one that has been more recently confirmed by e. g. Gestalt Theory and Sartre's study of Imagination. So, what seems to overwhelm the subject during a moment of Insight is not that it is a discovery of a truth, but that the Imagination's processes preempt any other activity.