In his
Biographia Literaria (
Chapter 13)
Coleridge wrote the following on the
IMAGINATION or
ESEMPLASTIC power:
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, coexisting 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; and blended with, and modified by that empirical phenomenon of the will which we express by the word CHOICE. But equally with the ordinary memory it must receive all its materials ready made from the law of association. ***Capitals and Italics as in the original text***
Coleridge conceives
God's creation to be a continuing
process, which has an
analogy in the creative
perception ("
primary imagination") of all
human minds. The creative process is repeated, "
echoed," on still a third level, by the "
secondary imagination" of the
poet, which dissolves the products of
primary perception in order to shape them into a new and unified
creation--the
imaginative passage or
poem. The "
fancy," on the other hand, can only
manipulate "
fixities and
definites" that, linked by
association, come to it
ready-made from perception. Its products, therefore, are not re-creations (echoes of
God's original
creative process) but
mosaic-like reassemblies of existing
bits and pieces.