Arbitrary Projection and Receptive Creation
Fantasy can become escapist wish-production or arbitrary rearrangement. Imagination is the receptive-creative faculty that perceives meaningful possibilities and gives them form. Coleridge’s primary imagination participates in perception; secondary imagination consciously re-creates; fancy rearranges existing images. Blake, Tolkien, and Corbin deepen the claim that imagination can mediate meaning rather than fabricate unreality.