Imagination and Fancy in Coleridge's Biographia Literaria
Coleridge,in his essay "Biographia Literaria",rejecting the empiricist assumption that the mind was tabula rasa on which external experience and sense impressions were imprinted, stored,recalled, combined both come from respectively the Latin word 'imaginato' and Greek word 'phantasia'. Coleridge defines imagination by saying that "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 am echo of the former, co-existing with the concious will, yet still as identical with the primary in the kind of its agency, and differing only in degrees, and in the mode of operation. It dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to recreate, or where this process is rendered impossible, yet still, at all events, it struggles to dealize and to unify....