Imagination, Conjecture, and Disorder

Imagination can put the world together or tear it apart, depending on how it works. Comparing the Cartesians and the empiricists of the eighteenth century, it is evident that the latter are more seriously invested in imagination than the former, partly because they rely on conjecture for the discovery of facts while the Cartesians use imagination to dispel the authority of sense impressions. Is it possible to suppose that when imagination becomes disordered, conjecture and factuality begin to be at odds? By using Northanger Abbey as a test case, the essay finds that there is a kind of fact-based empiricism (represented by Catherine Morland) that is hostile to conjecture but at the same time hospitable to romance. What are the implications of such a state of affairs for empirical truth and the probability of the novel?