It can be said that history always represents actions, and in this is implicit that it represents at the same time also desires, but only in so far as it distinguishes them from actions: history, therefore, is perception and memory of perception, and in it fancies and imaginations are also perceived as such and arranged in their place. And it would also be possible to say that art represents only desires, and is therefore all fancy and never perception, all possible reality and never effectual reality. But since to art is wanting the distinctive criterion between desires and actions, it in truth represents actions as desires and desires as actions, the real as possible, and the possible as real; hence it would be more correct to say that art is on the near side of the possible and the real, it is pure of these distinctions, and is therefore pure imagination or _pure intuition._ Desires and actions are, we know, of the same stuff, and art assumes that stuff just as it is, careless of the new elaboration that it will receive in an ulterior grade of the spirit, which is indeed impossible without that first and merely fantastic elaboration. Likewise when art takes possession of historical material, it removes from it just the historical character, the critical elements, and by this very fact reduces it once more to mere intuition. [Sidenote: _The purely fantastic and the imaginary._] It must further be noted that the purely fantastic, which is the representation of a desire, must not be confounded with the mechanical combination of images, that can be made idly, for amusement, or for practical ends. This operation (analogous to that of the intellect upon the pure concepts and representations, when it arbitrarily combines them in the pseudo-concepts), is secondary and derivative; and it presupposes the first, which provides it with the material that it cuts up and combines. Nothing is more extraneous and repugnant to poetry than this artificial _imagining,_ precisely because it is external and repugnant to reality. Hence his would be a vain objection who should coldly and capriciously combine the most different images and ask for an explanation of the whole, with desire as the fundamental principle. Such combinations as these, since they do not belong to poetry, are void of real psychical content. [Sidenote: _Art as lyrical or representation of feelings._]