Coleridge redefined imagination as having reason’s functions, opposed to fancy

Evidence

According to Coleridge’s theory of imagination, poetic vision presupposed the alteration of ordinary perception, regardless of how it might be attained. No longer opposed to reason, as in the secular Enlightenment, “imagination” now acquired some of reason’s functions, and stood in contrast to “fancy.” For Coleridge, himself deeply read in German Biblical Criticism, prophets were not men who sought to predict the future but creative poets who expressed a vision of their community’s past—the past both as a renewal of the present and as a promise for the future. — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 209

Categorization

• DEFINE: States the Coleridgean imagination/fancy distinction and how imagination absorbed reason’s functions after Enlightenment.