faculties, their appropriate marks, functions, and effects matured my
conjecture into full conviction,)--that Fancy and Imagination were two
distinct and widely different faculties, instead of being, according
to the general belief, either two names with one meaning, or, at
furthest, the lower and higher degree of one and the same power. It is
not, I own, easy to conceive a more apposite translation of the Greek
phantasia than the Latin imaginatio; but it is equally true that in
all societies there exists an instinct of growth, a certain
collective, unconscious good sense working progressively to
desynonymize [22] those words originally of the same meaning, which
the conflux of dialects supplied to the more homogeneous languages, as
the Greek and German: and which the same cause, joined with accidents
of translation from original works of different countries, occasion in
mixed languages like our own. The first and most important point to be
proved is, that two conceptions perfectly distinct are confused under
one and the same word, and--this done--to appropriate that word
exclusively to the one meaning, and the synonyme, should there be one,
to the other. But if,--(as will be often the case in the arts and
sciences,)--no synonyme exists, we must either invent or borrow a
word. In the present instance the appropriation has already begun, and
been legitimated in the derivative adjective: Milton had a highly
imaginative, Cowley a very fanciful mind. If therefore I should
succeed in establishing the actual existence of two faculties
generally different, the nomenclature would be at once determined. To
the faculty by which I had characterized Milton, we should confine the
term 'imagination;' while the other would be contra-distinguished as
'fancy.' Now were it once fully ascertained, that this division is no
less grounded in nature than that of delirium from mania, or Otway's

Lutes, laurels, seas of milk, and ships of amber,