English Synonyms and Antonyms

fantasy (often loosely called imagination) appears in dreaming, reverie, somnambulism, and intoxication.
Fantasy in ordinary usage simply denotes capricious or erratic fancy, as appears in the adjective fantastic.
Imagination and fancy differ from fantasy in bringing the images and their combinations under the control of
the will; imagination is the broader and higher term, including fancy; imagination is the act or power of
imaging or of reimaging objects of perception or thought, of combining the products of knowledge in
modified, new, or ideal forms--the creative or constructive power of the mind; while fancy is the act or power
of forming pleasing, graceful, whimsical, or odd mental images, or of combining them with little regard to
rational processes of construction; imagination in its lower form. Both fancy and imagination recombine and
modify mental images; either may work with the other's materials; imagination may glorify the tiniest flower;
fancy may play around a mountain or a star; the one great distinction between them is that fancy is superficial,
while imagination is deep, essential, spiritual. Wordsworth, who was the first clearly to draw the distinction
between the fancy and the imagination, states it as follows:
To aggregate and to associate, to evoke and to combine, belong as well to the imagination as to the fancy; but
either the materials evoked and combined are different; or they are brought together under a different law, and
for a different purpose. Fancy does not require that the materials which she makes use of should be
susceptible of changes in their constitution from her touch; and where they admit of modification, it is enough
for her purpose if it be slight, limited, and evanescent. Directly the reverse of these are the desires and
demands of the imagination. She recoils from everything but the plastic, the pliant, and the indefinite. She
leaves it to fancy to describe Queen Mab as coming:
'In shape no bigger than an agate stone On the forefinger of an alderman.'
Having to speak of stature, she does not tell you that her gigantic angel was as tall as Pompey's Pillar; much
less that he was twelve cubits or twelve hundred cubits high; or that his dimensions equalled those of
Teneriffe or Atlas; because these, and if they were a million times as high, it would be the same, are bounded.
The expression is, 'His stature reached the sky!' the illimitable firmament!--When the imagination frames a
comparison, ... a sense of the truth of the likeness from the moment that it is perceived grows--and continues
to grow--upon the mind; the resemblance depending less upon outline of form and feature than upon
expression and effect, less upon casual and outstanding than upon inherent and internal properties.[B]
Poetical Works, Pref. to Ed. of 1815, p. 646, app. [T. & H. '51.]
So far as actual images are concerned, both fancy and imagination are limited to the materials furnished by the
external world; it is remarkable that among all the representations of gods or demigods, fiends and demons,
griffins and chimæras, the human mind has never invented one organ or attribute that is not presented in
human or animal life; the lion may have a human head and an eagle's wings and claws, but in the various
features, individually, there is absolutely nothing new. But imagination can transcend the work of fancy, and
compare an image drawn from the external world with some spiritual truth born in the mind itself, or infuse a
series of images with such a spiritual truth, molding them as needed for its more vivid expression.
The imagination modifies images, and gives unity to variety; it sees all things in one.... There is the epic