This question of whether the mind can take an active part in the links that get set up between ideas became important for the Romantic thinkers at the end of the 18th Century. They perceived the ruling mindset of the 18th Century as denying power or activity or spontaneity to the mind, and argued that this conception should be rejected. The mind should properly be seen as active, the source of new flows of energy, of ideas that are new, not mere configurations or reconfigurations what is given through sense. In the mind, says Herder, there are living sparks.(See Roy Pascal, The German Sturm und Drang, 1953, Manchester University Press, p.183.)
One of the great Romantic champions of the mind as a creative agent was Samuel Coleridge, whose thinking was expressed in his proposed reform of the concept of the imagination. Imagination should be distinguished from fancy, he urged, where the fancy refers to the mind’s involvement in watching ideas move about as they will: the sort of state characteristic of daydreaming. The mind in states such as these is indeed ‘idle’, passive, a spectator. But it is capable of other things, says Coleridge. The human mind is a creative force, it can fashion new things, melt ideas into new amalgams as well as into new constructions: and it is the poet who is most adept at creativity of that sort.
This is one the ideas that constitutes the radical emphasis in Romantic thought on the role of the poet in human life. The poet it is who practises most expertly the power of creativity which is most distinctive, most invaluable, of human faculties.
(Coleridge's somewhat inchoate Biographica Literaria first published 1817 is one source of his ideas - see eg the Everyman Edition 1906.) A rivetting commentary is M.H. Abram's study The Mirror and the Lamp, 1953, OUP.)