This supernatural element—as we saw in the history of the words _creative_ and _genius_—is connected very intimately indeed with the origin of the Romantic Movement. And we shall see the connection even more clearly in the semantic development of two more words—the last to be examined in this book—_fancy_ and _imagination_. The various Greek words which the Latin ‘imago’ was used to translate acquired their special meanings among the Stoics, where, as we saw in Chapter VI, that teasing sense of a contrast, a lack of connection, between the “objective” and “subjective” worlds appears first to have developed. One of these words was ‘phantasia’, from which we have taken indirectly the divergent forms _fantasy_, _phantasy_, and _fancy_. By the third century A.D. the Greek ‘phantasia’ was predominantly used, so we are told, “in cases where, carried away by enthusiasm and passion, you think you see what you describe, and you place it before the eyes of your hearers”.[77] ‘Phantasia’ and ‘imaginatio’ were in use among the Schoolmen, and _fantasy_ and _imagination_ are both found in Chaucer in the sense of ‘a mental image or reflection’, or more particularly ‘an image of something which either has no real existence or does not yet exist’. After the Renaissance Shakespeare suddenly transfigured one of the two words in one of those extraordinary passages which make us feel that genius is indeed something more than earthly: And as imagination bodies forth The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing A local habitation and a name. In such a passage we seem to behold him standing up, a figure of colossal stature, gazing at us over the heads of the intervening generations. He transcends the flight of time and the laborious building up of meanings, and, picking up a part of the outlook of an age which is to succeed his by nearly two hundred years, gives it momentary expression before he lets it drop again. That mystical conception which the word embodies in these lines—a conception which would make imagination the interpreter and part creator of a whole unseen world—is not found again until the Romantic Movement has begun. And then it had to be reached slowly. Seventy years after Shakespeare wrote we find the philosopher, Henry More, cautiously distinguishing from other kinds of imagination “that Imagination which is most free, such as we use in Romantick Inventions”. “Imagining”, wrote Dryden “is in itself the very height and life of poetry”; and in 1712 Addison published in the _Spectator_ his papers on “The Pleasures of the Imagination”, in which he used the two words _fancy_ and _imagination_ synonymously, describing in one of the essays how, because of the faculty of which they are the names,