ABSTRACT
The terms 'fancy' and 'imagination' are generally associated with the name of Coleridge, especially when they are distinguished from or contrasted with each other. Thomas Hobbes sees the imagination as serving a rhetorical and not a logical purpose; its function is to clothe thought in attractive language, but it has no place in strictly logical discourse itself. John Locke developed a theory concerning the 'association of ideas' which again gave a hostile slant to what Hobbes had written about the imagination. Locke himself did not attempt to relate his theory of the association of ideas directly to the imagination, but his treatment of the subject obviously suggests a diminished status for poetry. Although Shaftesbury repudiated the association of ideas as an explanation of the imagination, he never substituted for it an adequate psychology of poetic composition, nor did he really come to terms with Locke on his own ground of epistemology.
