ABSTRACT
Imagination works holistically, as one would now say, or organically, as Coleridge said. It does not take discrete components as input and yield a novel assembly of them as output. In the associationist philosophical and psychological tradition, against which Coleridge was reacting, recombination of existing real elements into new fictional entities was itself taken as the characteristic operation of the imagination. In the romantic tradition, and specifically in Coleridge and Wordsworth, the active power of the imagination requires further characterization beyond the point at which it is said that imagination forms images as wholes. It is also said that imagination creates images which have what one might call a feeling tone or emotional charge. That is, imagination is not merely cognitive but also affective, though one might want to say that there is a scientific imagination which forms cognitive images as wholes in the shape of conjectures, hypotheses, paradigms or patterns.
