The scholastic theory of the inner senses can be viewed as an attempt to explain and classify cognitive abilities shared by human beings and nonrational animals, abilities that go beyond pure sensation and require a certain level of abstraction. Given that capacities such as reason or belief were generally denied to animals beginning in the classical period of Greek philosophy, these powers or faculties of the sensible soul were thought to account for goal-directed or intentional animal behavior as well as memory and dreaming in humans and animals.

Historically, the concept of the inner senses is rooted in Aristotle's (384–322 BCE) remarks on postsensory faculties of the soul in the second and third books of De Anima and in De memoria et reminiscentia. A model listing three "inner" psychic faculties, assigned to three cerebral ventricles (imagination/front ventricle, intellective faculty/middle ventricle, memory/rear ventricle), stems from...