The Poet and God: Participating in the Wave Potential Field

Introduction

In Chapter XIII of his Biographia Literaria, Coleridge formulated his concept of the imagination, or “the esemplastic power” (meaning “shaping or having the power to shape disparate things into a unified whole”). It was a passage that would come to define and articulate not only the Romantic conception of imagination, but the nature of God, being, perception, and our relation to the universe:

The Imagination then I consider either as primary, or secondary. The primary Imagination I hold to be the living Power and prime Agent of all human Perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I Am. The secondary I consider as an echo of the former, co-existing with the conscious will, yet still as identical with the primary in the kind of its agency, and differing only in degree, and in the mode of its operation. It dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to re-create; or where this process is rendered impossible, yet still at all events it struggles to idealize and to unify. It is essentially vital, even as all objects (as objects) are essentially fixed and dead.

Fancy, on the contrary, has no other counters to play with, but fixities and definites. The Fancy is indeed no other than a mode of Memory emancipated from the order of time and space; while it is blended with, and modified by that empirical phenomenon of the will, which we express by the word CHOICE. But equally with the ordinary memory the Fancy must receive all its materials ready made from the law of association.

Coleridge’s earliest definition of imagination actually comes at the beginning of his Lecture on the Slave Trade (1795), where he also talks about issues of creativity and “combination”, past and present, and imagination as a “vivifying” power or faculty.

The restless, transformative aspect of imaginative processes seem to both reflect, participate in, and co-create wider evolutionary processes of transformation – hence its role in what he strikingly calls here “the ascent of Being”, and which Shelley had also alluded to in his  great revolutionary poem Queen Mab (1813). In the very last lines of that poem, Shelley presents life, in all its great variety of forms, as embodying and transmitting a ceaseless and “necessarily beneficent” evolutionary process that entwines itself with what he here calls Necessity:

These writers and thinkers sensed a resonance or relationality between what they were doing as creative artists, and the activity they saw all around them – the constant transmutation of form, the vivifying and implicit energy within being – within the interconnected “web of being” as Shelley referred to it in Queen Mab.

But it was Coleridge and Wordsworth, from the earlier generation of “Romantic” poets and thinkers, who first publicly formulated these concepts, drawing both on progressive French materialism and German idealist philosophy. “To develope the powers of the Creator,” Coleridge observes in his 1795 lectures, 

is our proper employment – and to imitate Creativeness by combination our most exalted and self-satisfying Delight. But we are progressive and must not rest content with present Blessings. Our Almighty Parent hath therefore given to us Imagination that stimulates to the attainment of real excellence by the contemplation of splendid Possibilities that still revivifies the dying motive within us, and fixing our eye on the glittering Summits that rise one above the other in Alpine endlessness still urges us up the ascent of Being, amusing the ruggedness of the road with the beauty and grandeur of the ever-widening Prospect. Such and so noble are the ends for which this restless faculty was given us – but horrible has been its misapplication. 

This is one of Coleridge’s most important statements about the imagination, and it foreshadows the definitions of primary and secondary imagination in Biographia. Rather than being simply a faculty for rearranging materials fed to it by the senses and the memory, the Imagination is a shaping and ordering power, a ‘modifying’ power which colours objects of sense with the mind’s own light: 

Ah! from the soul itself must issue forth

A light, a glory, a fair luminous cloud

                Enveloping the Earth—

And from the soul itself must there be sent

         A sweet and potent voice, of its own birth,

Of all sweet sounds the life and element!

– Coleridge, Dejection: An Ode

The mind is not the passive recorder of sense impressions; it is not (as for the Lockean empiricist) an inert block of wax on which external objects imprint themselves. On the contrary, for Coleridge as for Wordsworth, perception is a bilateral rather than a unilateral activity; sense experience is a stimulus that evokes a response and involves (to borrow a phrase from Wordsworth) “A balance, an ennobling interchange/ Of action from within and from without” (The Prelude).

Thus the product in any given act of perception is a modified combination of the percipient and the thing-perceived and is, as Coleridge asserts in Biographia, neither a subject (perceiver) nor an object (thing- perceived) exclusively, but rather the most original union of both.

As John Spencer Hill remarks, “in and through the act of blending ‘thoughts’ and ‘things’, the (primary) Imagination functions as a fusing, synthesising power – an esemplastic power whose operation generates a new reality by shaping parts into wholes, by reconciling opposites and drawing unity from diversity. It is not, as for the neoclassical critic, a mechanical faculty (‘aggregative and associative’); it is, rather, a vital and organic power common to all men, which permits the mind to penetrate beneath the transitory surface of the material world, that is, to see into the life of things and experience the intimate relationship between the perceiving mind and the objects of its contemplation. The germinal potency of Coleridge’s theory of Imagination lies in his rejection of passive perception, his recognition of perception as integrative, poietic, and necessarily correlative with feeling, and his understanding that the poetic Imagination grows out of a seamless bond between perception, memory, association, feeling, intellect, and a sense of language as being in some way autonomous” (Hill, Imagination in Coleridge, 1978).

The germinal potency of the theory of Imagination lies in Coleridge’s rejection of passive perception. The mind, he told Poole in 1801, is made in “the Image of the Creator“; it is not, as materialists maintain, “a lazy Looker-on on an external world” and there is, therefore, “ground for suspicion, that any system built on the passiveness of the mind must be false, as a system”.

Perception – or “Primary Imagination” as he later called it – is integrative, poietic, and necessarily correlate with feeling; it is a creative activity in which images, ideas and feelings are fused and blended by the mind. As Hill again observes: “This power is supremely human and is a part of every man’s birthright, and it makes each of us in a way a poet: ‘We all have obscure feelings that must be connected with some thing or other – the Miser with a guinea – Lord Nelson with a blue Ribbon – Wordsworth’s old Molly with her washing Tub – Wordsworth with the Hills, Lakes, & Trees-/ all men are poets in their way, tho’ for the most part their ways are damned bad ones’ (Collected Letters).”

Related to this activity and differing from it in degree but not in kind is the operation of the poetic (or Secondary) Imagination, a power which is latent but not equally developed in all humans. This power works by breaking down and then refashioning original perceptions, to re-present the common universe in such a way that we see it as if for the first time. In the language of contemporary neuroscience, it is a way of restoring the brain to a right hemisphere mode of seeing and relating to the world: as Presence, rather than as mere Re-presentation, as McGilchrist notes; as synthesising (and not merely analytic, as the left hemisphere is); as vivifying (and not abstracting and deadening, as the left brain is), and as fundamentally entwined and participating in the reality it constantly experiences and delivers us. 

Is “Primary” imagination really primary, or secondary?

Coleridge’s brief statement on the nature of the Primary Imagination has led to copious later interpretations and scholarly disagreements about what exactly the imagination was, and what his distinction between the ‘Primary” and “Secondary” nature of its operations actually signifies.

Shawcross (editor of the classic Oxford edition of the Biographia in 1907) maintained that by “primary” Coleridge means the common, universal aspect of it: as Shawcross explains, “the primary imagination is the origin of common perception, the faculty by which we have experience of an actual world of phenomena. The secondary imagination is the same power in a heightened degree, which enables its possessor to see the world of our common experience in its real significance.” In this definition, everyone therefore possesses this primary or fundamental form of “imagination”; poets, artists and those with enhanced perception additionally experience a “secondary” or heightened form of is powers and operations. Anyone who consciously (left brain) seeks to be imaginative or creative (right hemisphere) participates in this “echo” or “secondary” imagination (as “an echo of the former”). 

Primary imagination might therefore be understood as spontaneous, involuntary – perhaps even operating “unconsciously” (as Shelley suggests in A Defence of Poetry, 1821) – as opposed to the secondary form, which Coleridge suggests is “co-existing with the conscious will”. But the boundary here seems to be fluid, porous: as Shelley notes – and surely Coleridge would have been himself aware of this, as the author of poems such as Kubla Khan – poetic inspiration seems to act on the poet in a largely “unconscious” (right hemisphere) way, operating above and beyond the exertions of “conscious will”:

Poetry is not like reasoning, a power to be exerted according to the determination of the will. A man cannot say, “I will compose poetry.” The greatest poet even cannot say it; for the mind in creation is as a fading coal, which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness; this power arises from within, like the colour of a flower which fades and changes as it is developed, and the conscious portions of our natures are unprophetic either of its approach or its departure.

Shelley also draws our attention to the spiritual, psychological, and epistemological function and nature of poetic imagination, in liberating us both from the dull mechanical repetitions of the world of representation and memory, and in connecting us to the true sources of life and animation in the universe within which we are surrounded and in which we totally participate in.

“Poetry”, or the acts of creative imagination itself, he says, “defeats the curse which binds us to be subjected to the accident of surrounding impressions. And whether it spreads its own figured curtain, or withdraws life’s dark veil from before the scene of things, it equally creates for us a being within our being. It makes us the inhabitants of a world to which the familiar world is a chaos. It reproduces the common universe of which we are portions and percipients, and it purges from our inward sight the film of familiarity which obscures from us the wonder of our being. It compels us to feel that which we perceive, and to imagine that which we know. It creates anew the universe, after it has been annihilated in our minds by the recurrence of impressions blunted by reiteration. It justifies the bold and true words of Tasso—’Non merita nome di creatore, se non Iddio ed il Poeta’ [‘none but God and the poet deserve the name of Creator’].”

Shelley here deftly connects Coleridge’s earlier comments about “the film of familiarity” in his Biographia (published just a few years before Shelley wrote his “Defence”), with these much wider cultural and theological contexts and conversations regarding the nature of creativity. Could it be that poets, and all creative artists, and all creative acts, echo and participate not only in “creation” but in the creation of God itself, through time – through the “ascent of being”, as Coleridge had formulated it. Blake called this ongoing process of creative work “Golgonooza”, and urged everyone to become part of it, to participate in an essentially participatory universe.

As Jonathan Wordsworth suggests in his interpretation of Coleridge’s ideas on being and imagination, “With the primary imagination man unknowingly reenacts God’s original and eternal creative moment; with the secondary he consciously vitalizes an object-world that would otherwise be dead; with the fancy he plays unvital games, dependent upon choice and the laws of association.” 

This tripartite distinction, Jonathan Wordsworth notes, was also interestingly to be found in contemporary European thinking at that time – suggesting a morphogenetic or collective unconscious aspect to these germinating impulses and insights, with Coleridge drawing (both consciously and unconsciously) from the work of Akenside, Berkeley, and Hartley, as well as from his later German-metaphysic reading, including Schelling, Kant, Fichte, and Tetens.

Creativity versus Causation

“The noblest gift of Imagination”, Coleridge writes, in words that explain one important aspect of the primary in Biographia, “is the power of discerning the Cause in the Effect.” The power, that is, of perceiving God in His creation. “We see our God everywhere”, Coleridge adds in the next sentence, “the Universe in the most literal Sense is his written Language” (Lectures, 1795). As Blake had similarly observed:

… every Natural Effect has a Spiritual Cause, and Not
⁠A Natural: for a Natural Cause only seems: it is a Delusion
Of Ulro & a ratio of the perishing Vegetable Memory

– William Blake, Milton

Whilst the Enlightenment philosopher David Hume had already earlier explained that the rational mind knows nothing in fact of the relation between cause and effect, other than their apparent regular concurrence (despite causation being supposedly the basis of its whole mechanical and materialistic system of explanation), Coleridge and Blake see that rationality can never understand this connection because the origins of “causal” power are in fact implicit, contextual, and transcendent. Rationality only works in retrospective, through memory, and the analysis and study of what has already happened, and what can be repeated. It is like a hamster working in a cage: “Man, by his Reasoning Power, can only compare and judge of what he has already perceiv’d … If it were not for the Poetic or Prophetic Character, the Philosophic and Experimental would soon be at the Ratio of all things; and stand still, unable to do other than repeat the same dull round over again” (Blake, There is No Natural Religion).

Imagination allows us insight into both the reality of the present moment, and the multiple forces acting on it, and in addition allows us to participate in that moment, and even to help evolve it – hence, the reason why we do have “new” discoveries, and not “the same dull round over again”.

Indeed, as Jonathan Wordsworth notes, “Coleridge’s first pronouncement on the subject of imagination and fancy, in September 1802, exactly parallels Blake’s distinction in the Preface to Milton, between literary works that are ‘Daughters of Inspiration’, and those that are merely ‘Daughters of Memory’. The first are associated by Blake with imagination, ‘the Sublime of the Bible’, truth, justice and eternity; the second with artifice, imitation, classical poetry and philosophy, and also war (seen as the conflict between parts that ought to be in harmony). Coleridge, writing very possibly in the same year, is concerned for a start with the errors of Greek polytheism (as indeed Blake had been in Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Plate 11).”

It must occur to every Reader that the Greeks in their religious poems address always the Numina Loci, the Genii, the Dryads, the Naiads, etc. etc. All natural Objects were dead – mere hollow Statues – but there was a Godkin or Goddessling included in each.

In the Hebrew Poetry you find nothing of this poor Stuff – as poor in genuine Imagination, as it is mean in Intellect. At best, it is but Fancy, or the aggregating Faculty of the mind – not Imagination, or the modifying, and co-adunating Faculty. (Coleridge, Collected Letters) 

Coleridge’s coinage ‘Co-adunating’ (he was an inveterate coiner: the first recorded use of the word esemplastic is in his Biographia Literaria; he was also responsible for our words psychoanalytical, psychosomatic, bisexual, dynamic, factual, and pessimism), comes from Latin ‘co-adunare’, ‘to join into one’. Fancy is cumulative – and her works are the Daughters of Memory: imagination, on the other hand (or hemisphere) actually modifies, and by recreating the materials of experience produces the oneness that for Coleridge, as for Blake, is a sign or manifestation of ultimate truth, of holism.

“In the Hebrew Poets”, Coleridge’s letter continues, 

each Thing has a Life of it’s own, & yet they are all one Life. In God they move & live, & have their Being – not had, as the cold System of Newtonian Theology represents, but have. 

One recalls that in Jerusalem – the poem in which the parts of Blake’s fallen, or vegetable, world come finally together – there are prefaces addressed respectively to The Deists and The Christians. Deism is “the cold System of Newtonian Theology”, as Coleridge calls it, according to which God in the beginning started the world going and left it. Christianity (in this context, at least) is the universe pervaded by a God who is eternally present in his Creation.

There is no reason to think that Coleridge would at this period have dissented from the gigantic claims made by Blake in Jerusalem, Plate 77: 

I know of no other Christianity and of no other Gospel than the liberty both of body and mind to exercise the Divine Arts of Imagination – Imagination, the real & eternal World of which this Vegetable Universe is but a faint shadow, & in which we shall live in our Eternal or Imaginative Bodies when these Vegetable Mortal Bodies are no more.

Imagination is that which is eternal within the individual human being, and thus “a portion of eternity” itself. To put it in Coleridge’s terms, “In God [we] move & live & have [our] Being”. Though by this stage one might expect him to be moving towards Trinitarian ways of thinking, the Hebrew poets are still for Coleridge prophets of Unitarian pantheism. Earlier in his letter he had commented: 

Nature has her proper interest; & he will know what it is, who believes & feels, that every Thing has a Life of it’s own, & that we are all one Life. (Collected Letters) 

The proper interest of Nature lies in its being permeated by the One Life – ” ’tis God/Diffused through all, that doth make all one whole” (Religious Musings) – and in its being, in Blake’s words, “a faint shadow” of “the real & eternal World”.

The proper function of the poet is to proclaim the One Life, and to reveal the faint shadow as consisting of clouds that veil the Almighty from the gaze of fallen man. To reveal, in other words, that what we call “Nature” (LH Representation) is in fact “Divine Imagination” itself, and that imagination is not natural but is powerfully, intrinsically divine and transcendent, and indeed spiritual (“supernatural”, in the only word naturalists can have for such an operation):

I feel that a Man may be happy in This World. And I know that This World Is a World of Imagination & Vision. I see Every thing I paint In This World, but Every body does not see alike. To the Eyes of a Miser a Guinea is more beautiful than the Sun, & a bag worn with the use of Money has more beautiful proportions than a Vine filled with Grapes. The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the Eyes of others only a Green thing that stands in the way. Some see Nature all Ridicule & Deformity & by these I shall not regulate my proportions, & Some Scarce see nature at all. But to the Eyes of the Man of Imagination Nature is Imagination itself. As a man is So he Sees. As the Eye is formed such are its Powers. (William Blake, Letter to Dr Trusler, August 1799)

Some people can only see ‘Nature”. And this, Blake suggests, is because of the nature of their mental “powers”, and their failure (or more usually their society’s failure) to cultivate those imaginative (“primary”) powers and perceptions that are actually connected to and in touch with fundamental reality or being, co-participating in them, and which can reveal its true nature (the right hemisphere networks and faculties, in the language of modern neuroscience).

But it was also to a study and exploration of exactly these same “powers” that Coleridge devoted his life, and reached such startling formulation in his distinction between various levels or networks of “imagination”, “coordination”, and “fancy”. As Jonathan Wordsworth summaries this distinction: “The primary imagination at its highest is the supreme human achievement of oneness with God; the secondary, though limited by comparison, contains the hope that in the act of writing the poet may attain to a similar power.”

Here is the full text of Coleridge’s chapter, which places his comments on the primary and secondary imagination, and their contradistinction to mere “fancy”, in context:

Biographia Literaria

Chapter XIII

On the imagination, or esemplastic power

   

“What we call ‘Nature’ (LH Representation) is in fact ‘Divine Imagination’ itself”. Image: Adam Naming the Beasts, by William Blake (1810).

O Adam, One Almighty is, from whom

    All things proceed, and up to him return,

    If not deprav’d from good, created all

    Such to perfection, one first matter all,

    Endued with various forms, various degrees

    Of substance, and, in things that live, of life;

    But more refin’d, more spiritous and pure,

    As nearer to him plac’d, or nearer tending,

    Each in their several active spheres assigu’d,

    Till body up to spirit work, in bounds

    Proportion’d to each kind. So from the root

    Springs lighter the green stalk, from thence the leaves

    More aery: last the bright consummate flower

    Spirits odorous breathes: flowers and their fruit,

    Man’s nourishment, by gradual scale sublim’d,

    To vital spirits aspire: to animal:

    To intellectual!—give both life and sense,

    Fancy and understanding; whence the soul

    REASON receives, and reason is her being,

    Discursive or intuitive. 

– Milton, Paradise Lost, Book V. I. 469

Des Cartes, speaking as a naturalist, and in imitation of Archimedes, said, give me matter and motion and I will construct you the universe. We must of course understand him to have meant; I will render the construction of the universe intelligible. In the same sense the transcendental philosopher says; grant me a nature having two contrary forces, the one of which tends to expand infinitely, while the other strives to apprehend or find itself in this infinity, and I will cause the world of intelllgences with the whole system of their representations to rise up before you. Every other science presupposes intelligence as already existing and complete: the philosopher contemplates it in its growth, and as it were represents its history to the mind from its birth to its maturity.

The venerable sage of Koenigsberg has preceded the march of this master-thought as an effective pioneer in his essay on the introduction of negative quantities into philosophy, published 1763. In this he has shown, that instead of assailing the science of mathematics by metaphysics, as Berkeley did in his ANALYST, or of sophisticating it, as Wolf did, by the vain attempt of deducing the first principles of geometry from supposed deeper grounds of ontology, it behoved the metaphysician rather to examine whether the only province of knowledge, which man has succeeded in erecting into a pure science, might not furnish materials, or at least hints, for establishing and pacifying the unsettled, warring, and embroiled domain of philosophy. An imitation of the mathematical method had indeed been attempted with no better success than attended the essay of David to wear the armour of Saul.

Another use however is possible and of far greater promise, namely, the actual application of the positions which had so wonderfully enlarged the discoveries of geometry, mutatis mutandis, to philosophical subjects. Kant having briefly illustrated the utility of such an attempt in the questions of space, motion, and infinitely small quantities, as employed by the mathematician, proceeds to the idea of negative quantities and the transfer of them to metaphysical investigation. Opposites, he well observes, are of two kinds, either logical, that is, such as are absolutely incompatible; or real, without being contradictory. The former he denominates Nihil negativum irrepraesentabile, the connection of which produces nonsense. A body in motion is something—Aliquid cogitabile; but a body, at one and the same time in motion and not in motion, is nothing, or, at most, air articulated into nonsense. But a motory force of a body in one direction, and an equal force of the same body in an opposite direction is not incompatible, and the result, namely, rest, is real and representable.

For the purposes of mathematical calculus it is indifferent which force we term negative, and which positive, and consequently we appropriate the latter to that, which happens to be the principal object in our thoughts. Thus if a man’s capital be ten and his debts eight, the subtraction will be the same, whether we call the capital negative debt, or the debt negative capital. But in as much as the latter stands practically in reference to the former, we of course represent the sum as 10-8. It is equally clear that two equal forces acting in opposite directions, both being finite and each distinguished from the other by its direction only, must neutralize or reduce each other to inaction.

Now the transcendental philosophy demands; first, that two forces should be conceived which counteract each other by their essential nature; not only not in consequence of the accidental direction of each, but as prior to all direction, nay, as the primary forces from which the conditions of all possible directions are derivative and deducible: secondly, that these forces should be assumed to be both alike infinite, both alike indestructible. The problem will then be to discover the result or product of two such forces, as distinguished from the result of those forces which are finite, and derive their difference solely from the circumstance of their direction.

When we have formed a scheme or outline of these two different kinds of force, and of their different results, by the process of discursive reasoning, it will then remain for us to elevate the thesis from notional to actual, by contemplating intuitively this one power with its two inherent indestructible yet counteracting forces, and the results or generations to which their inter-penetration gives existence, in the living principle and in the process of our own self-consciousness. By what instrument this is possible the solution itself will discover, at the same time that it will reveal to and for whom it is possible. Non omnia possumus omnes. There is a philosophic no less than a poetic genius, which is differenced from the highest perfection of talent, not by degree but by kind.

The counteraction then of the two assumed forces does not depend on their meeting from opposite directions; the power which acts in them is indestructible; it is therefore inexhaustibly re-ebullient; and as something must be the result of these two forces, both alike infinite, and both alike indestructible; and as rest or neutralization cannot be this result; no other conception is possible, but that the product must be a tertium aliquid, or finite generation. Consequently this conception is necessary. Now this tertium aliquid can be no other than an inter-penetration of the counteracting powers, partaking of both.

     *     *     *     *     *     *

Thus far had the work been transcribed for the press, when I received the following letter from a friend, whose practical judgment I have had ample reason to estimate and revere, and whose taste and sensibility preclude all the excuses which my self-love might possibly have prompted me to set up in plea against the decision of advisers of equal good sense, but with less tact and feeling.

[Coleridge here inserts a letter he has supposedly received. Most modern commentators believe that Coleridge himself wrote the letter. It resembles rather one of Blake’s invented ‘Memorable Fancies’ in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell – an imaginative scene to suggest indirectly and unconsciously the explicit arguments which the text is surrounded by].

Dear C.

"You ask my opinion concerning your Chapter on the Imagination ... In short, what I had supposed substances were thinned away into shadows, while everywhere shadows were deepened into substances.

So much for myself. But as for the Public I do not hesitate a moment in advising and urging you to withdraw the Chapter from the present work, and to reserve it for your announced treatises on the Logos or communicative intellect in Man and Deity. First, because imperfectly as I understand the present Chapter, I see clearly that you have done too much, and yet not enough. You have been obliged to omit so many links, from the necessity of compression, that what remains, looks (if I may recur to my former illustration) like the fragments of the winding steps of an old ruined tower.

For who, he might truly observe, could from your title-page, to wit, "My Literary Life and Opinions," published too as introductory to a volume of miscellaneous poems, have anticipated, or even conjectured, a long treatise on Ideal Realism which holds the same relation in abstruseness to Plotinus, as Plotinus does to Plato.

It will be well, if already you have not too much of metaphysical disquisition in your work, though as the larger part of the disquisition is historical, it will doubtless be both interesting and instructive to many to whose unprepared minds your speculations on the esemplastic power would be utterly unintelligible.

Your affectionate, etc.

In consequence of this very judicious letter, which produced complete conviction on my mind, I shall content myself for the present with stating the main result of the chapter, which I have reserved for that future publication, a detailed prospectus of which the reader will find at the close of the second volume.

The Imagination then I consider either as primary, or secondary. The primary Imagination I hold to be the living power and prime agent of all human perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM. The secondary Imagination I consider as an echo of the former, co-existing with the conscious will, yet still as identical with the primary in the kind of its agency, and differing only in degree, and in the mode of its operation. It dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to recreate: or where this process is rendered impossible, yet still at all events it struggles to idealize and to unify. It is essentially vital, even as all objects (as objects) are essentially fixed and dead.

FANCY, on the contrary, has no other counters to play with, but fixities and definites. The fancy is indeed no other than a mode of memory emancipated from the order of time and space; while it is blended with, and modified by that empirical phaenomenon of the will, which we express by the word Choice. But equally with the ordinary memory the Fancy must receive all its materials ready made from the law of association.