Imaginary body

Meaning

Corps fantasque, an imaginary or fanciful body, names the wrong result of trying to force an unsuitable beginning into the place of Nature’s legitimate generative subject. It is a polemical contrast with the universal seed which the investigator is meant to discover, not praise for creative imagination. Elsewhere the author values intellectual imagining as a mode of discerning what the senses cannot isolate; here the adjective condemns a substitute which does not answer to natural generation. The local distinction prevents “imaginary” from being used as a blanket dismissal of every inward or conceptual mode of knowing in the book.