Book "Snake Bite"-By P. BANERJI available again at Rs. 5/- each P. BANERJI MIHIJAM. (S.P.) Academic Costumes Phone : 34-1718 [JUNE, 1960 PRR Daient 7-31-63 Peplace. CALCUTTA REVIEW Vol. 155] JUNE, 1960 [ No. 3 COLERIDGE ON FANCY AND THE TWO DR. P. S. SASTRI, M.A., M.LITT., PH.D., 1. The eighteenth century considered imagination to be just some form of visualisation. Basing his argument on Kant's distinction between the conceivable and picturable, Coleridge rejected the value of this despotism of the eye'. He disparaged the delusive notion that what is not imageable is likewise not conceivable' (BL 1. 89, 74; Logic and Learning 126). This does not, however, mean that in Coleridge's theory imagination exists independent of the senses or that it involves no visual factor. On the contrary, he observed: "If the check of the senses and the reason were withdrawn, the first (=fancy) would become delirium, and the last (= imagination) mania " (TT 1834. 6. 23). Both these faculties need the activity of the senses and of reason. He is more explicit in his Table Talk for May 1, 1833, where he observed that "genius of the highest kind implies an unusual intensity of the modifying power, which detached from the discriminative power, might conjure a platted straw into a royal diadem ". At the same time, he stated: “the activity of thought and vivacity of the accumulative memory are no less essential constituents of great wits". What the eighteenth century understood by imagination, is now designated fancy; and then these two terms are desynonymised. In a letter to Southey of December, 1794 Coleridge advocated the corporeality of thought. By 1800 we hear of his serious occupation' in investing the laws by which our feelings are related to each other and to words. Thought was no longer taken to be the product of the activity of the senses. The emphasis falls on the mind. On March 16, 1801 we find him telling Poole that he is on the way" to evolve all the five senses, that is, to deduce them from one sense, and to state their growth and the causes of their difference". This one sense, we may for convenience designate, mind. All our senses and all our faculties are deducible from the mind. Then fancy and imagination have a common source, a common origin. How are they to be distinguished from one another? In a letter to Sharp dated January 15, 1804, he speaks of the "Imagination or the modifying power in that highest sense of the word, in which I have ventured to oppose it to Fancy, or the aggregating power in that sense in which it is a dim analogue of creation not all that we can believe, but all that we can conceive of creation". Imagination is an activity similar to that of the creative prosess; it modifies or transforms the material on which it operates. Fancy on the other is its opposite. It cannot modify the material since it can only combine or group together mechanically. In this light it is observed that the ancient music "consists of melody arising from a succession only of pleasing sounds". while while “the modern embraces harmony also, the result of combination and the effect of a whole" (L 50). Fancy depends upon the succession of events in time and it combines these events associately in such a way that the event retains its original character. Imagination on the other is a principle introducing harmony, into the manifold, and by virtue of this it transforms the given into a whole. 2. A distinction has long been known to exist among the more important and frequent mental activities. Tetens in his Philosophische Versuche Uber die menschliche Nature (1777) distinguishes bildende Dichtkraft' which is artistic or poetic from Phantasie' (pp. 103, 112). Kant has reproductive, productive, and aesthetic varieties of imagination. Schelling (1. 357; 5. 386) has Phantasie' and Einbildungskriaft '. Schlegel considered Einbildungskraft to be a mere form of memory, and treated Phantasie as higher. Jean Paul Richter took the former to be a potentiated brightly-coloured memory', and held that Phantasie is the power of making all parts into a whole' (Aesthetik, 1817). The prevailing confusion regarding the precise meaning of these and other allied terms led Coleridge to investigate the seminal principle and then from the kind to deduce the degree" (BL 1. 64). As a result of these investigations he came to interpret phantasie not as the higher, but as the lower, power. 66 In this endeavour he was, no doubt, helped, at least to some extent, by Kant's Critique of Judgment. Kant's reproductive imagination has some similarity to fancy. His productive imagination is nearer to the primary. Since these are said to be forms of imagination it is possible that fancy and imagination may co-exist in one and the same activity. Speaking of Wordsworth's account, he observes : "I am disposed to conjecture, that he has mistaken the co-presence of fancy and imagination for the operation of the latter singly. A man may work with two different tools at the same moment; each has its share in the work, but the work effected by each is very different" (BL 1. 194). When these two powers co-exist in the same activity, it is not easy to distinguish them. But he states that in order to achieve the highest excellencies in language, passion and character, the poet needs 'good sense, talent, sensibility, and imagination'; and to the perfection of work he needs the two lesser faculties of fancy and a quick sense of beauty'. These lesser ones are necessary for the ornaments and foliage of the column and the roof' (L 33). Yet it is certain that "Imagination must have fancy. In short the higher intellectual powers can only act through a corresponding energy of the lower" (TT, August 20, 1833). Fancy regulates the mental activity, but imagination is constitutive of this activity (cf. Fr. 504). Fancy then appears to be the power regulating the figures and other external ornaments, the form as it were of the creative art. It is a power associating the figures, images and diction with the central thought or feeling. This fancy was for a long time treated as if it were the same as imagination. The first clear statement of this view was given by Hobbes who influenced many writers. In his Leviathan Hobbes remarked: "After the object is removed, or the eye shut, we still retain an image of the thing seen. And this it is, the Latins call imagination, from the image made in seeing. . . . But the Greeks call it fancy, which signifies appearance ". Here we have only the subjective forms, which are erroneously presented as the true and proper moulds of objective truth '; and in such an act there is no method (cf. Fr. 506), for these fancies are motions within us, reliques of those made in the sense" regulated by mere succession (Levia 1. 3). The revolt against Hobbes began at a very early date. 3. In 1795 Coleridge borrowed from the Bristol Library Bishop Burnet's History of my own Times. In this work Burnet gave in detail the struggle launched by the Cambridge Platonists against the teaching of Hobbes. One of these is Cudworth whose True Intellectual System Coleridge borrowed from the same library in May, 1795 and in November, 1796. According to Cudworth, the mind has a creative function even in the knowledge-situation, for it has the power of forming concepts The creative activity is said to be necessary for an apprehen |