Note 15 — PHILOSOPHY OF LIFE.
A. J. W. (Alexander James William) Morrison translation
It is clear from what follows, that Schlegel used the term Fancy in a wide and general sense, which embraces, first, its original use in ancient philosophy, as the faculty of conception (φαντασια), which reproduces the images of objects whether present or absent; secondly, imagination, which is essential to all authors; and thirdly, fancy, in a narrow sense—or the poetic fancy. It is in this wide sense that the translator employs it after Milton who uses it, as more extensive than imagination, when he says of fancy,
“Of all the external things Which the five watchful senses represent, She forms imaginations, aery shapes.” Par. Lost, Book V.
Indeed the whole of the speech of Raphael in this fifth book contains a striking affinity of thought and idea with Schlegel. We have there man’s triple constituents, body, soul, and spirit—reason and fancy in the soul, of which reason is the being or essence—while discursive reason is appropriated to man, but intuitive reason is made the prerogative of the “purest spirits”—“the pure intelligential substances.”—Trans.