Imagination

Our simple apprehension of corporeal objects, if present, is sense; if absent, is imagination.

Imagination is of three kinds: joined with belief of that which is to come; joined with memory of that which is past; and of things present, or as if they were present.

The imagination of common language - the productive imagination of philosophers - is nothing but the representative process plus the process to which I would give the name of the "comparative."

The power of the mind to decompose its conceptions, and to recombine the elements of them at its pleasure, is called its faculty of imagination.

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.

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.

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.