Fancy is passive; it sees objects, which are fixed, definite, known and ‘dead’. Imagination, by contrast, is active, vital, and is already part of what it sees (there is no subject-object divide here). Fancy puts together things already known in a novel way; imagination recreates the known and familiar as something unique and new, by a process of inhabiting, or permeating from the inside – not by combination or addition from the outside. Fancy is subject to conscious choice.
