show, the essence of the imaginative faculty is utterly mysterious and
inexplicable, and to be recognized in its results only, or in the
negative results of its absence, the metaphysicians, as far as I am
acquainted with their works, miss it altogether, and never reach higher
than a definition of fancy by a false name.

What I understand by fancy will presently appear, not that I contend for
nomenclature, but only for distinction between two mental faculties, by
whatever name they be called, one the source of all that is great in the
poetic arts; the other merely decorative and entertaining, but which are
often confounded together, and which have so much in common as to render
strict definition of either difficult.

Sec. 3. The definition of D. Stewart, how inadequate.

Dugald Stewart's meagre definition may serve us for a starting point.
"Imagination," he says, "includes conception or simple apprehension,
which enables us to form a notion of those former objects of perception
or of knowledge, out of which we are to make a selection; abstraction,
which separates the selected materials from the qualities and
circumstances which are connected with them in nature; and judgment or
taste, which selects the materials and directs their combination. To
these powers we may add that particular habit of association to which I
formerly gave the name of fancy, as it is this which presents to our
choice all the different materials which are subservient to the efforts
of imagination, and which may therefore be considered as forming the
ground-work of poetical genius."

(By fancy in this passage, we find on referring to the chapter treating
of it, that nothing more is meant than the rapid occurrence of ideas of
sense to the mind.)

Now, in this definition, the very point and purpose of all the inquiry
is missed. We are told that judgment or taste "directs the combination."
In order that anything may be directed, an end must be previously
determined: What is the faculty that determines this end? and of what
frame and make, how boned and fleshed, how conceived or seen, is the end
itself? Bare judgment, or taste, cannot approve of what has no
existence; and yet by Dugald Stewart's definition we are left to their
catering among a host of conceptions, to produce a combination which, as
they work for, they must see and approve before it exists. This power of
prophecy is the very essence of the whole matter, and it is just that
inexp