The business of conception is to present us with an exact
transcript of what we have felt or perceived. But we have moreover
a power of modifying our conceptions, by combining the parts of
different ones together, so as to form new wholes of our creation.
I shall employ the word imagination to express this power.
Stewart.
3. The power to recombine the materials furnished by experience or
memory, for the accomplishment of an elevated purpose; the power of
conceiving and expressing the ideal.
The lunatic, the lover, and the poet Are of imagination all compact
. . . The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling, Doth glance from
heaven to earth, from earth to heaven, And as imagination bodies
forth The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen Turns them to
shapes, and gives to airy nothing A local habitation and a name.
Shak.
4. A mental image formed by the action of the imagination as a faculty;
a conception; a notion. Shak.
Syn. -- Conception; idea; conceit; fancy; device; origination;
invention; scheme; design; purpose; contrivance. -- Imagination, Fancy.
These words have, to a great extent, been interchanged by our best
writers, and considered as strictly synonymous. A distinction, however,
is now made between them which more fully exhibits their nature.
Properly speaking, they are different exercises of the same general
power -- the plastic or creative faculty. Imagination consists in
taking parts of our conceptions and combining them into new forms and
images more select, more striking, more delightful, more terrible,
etc., than those of ordinary nature. It is the higher exercise of the
two. It creates by laws more closely connected with the reason; it has
strong emotion as its actuating and formative cause; it aims at results
of a definite and weighty character. Milton's fiery lake, the debates
of his Pandemonium, the exquisite scenes of his Paradise, are all
products of the imagination. Fancy moves on a lighter wing; it is
governed by laws of association which are more remote, and sometimes
arbitrary or capricious. Hence the term fanciful, which exhibits fancy
in its wilder flights. It has for its actuating spirit feelings of a
lively, gay, and versatile character; it seeks to please by unexpected
combinations of thought, startling contrasts, flashes of brilliant
imagery, etc. Pope's Rape of the Lock is an exhibition of fancy which
has scarcely its equal in the literature of any country. -- "This, for
instance, Wordsworth did in respect of the words ‘imagination' and
‘fancy.' Before he wrote, it was, I suppose, obscurely felt by most
that in ‘imagination' there was more of the earnest, in ‘fancy' of the
play of the spirit; that the first was a loftier faculty and gift than
the second; yet for all this words were continually, and not without
loss, confounded. He first, in the preface to his Lyrical Ballads,
rendered it henceforth impossible that any one, who had read and
mastered what he has written on the two words, should remain
unconscious any longer of the important difference between them."
Trench.
The same power, which we should call fancy if employed on a
production of a light nature, would be dignified with the title of
imagination if shown on a grander scale.