Also 7 phantasticalness. [f. as prec. + -NESS.] The quality, condition, or fact of being fantastical.
† 1. The condition of being subject to phantasms.
1547. Boorde, Brev. Health, II. 27. Fantasticalnes, or collucion, or illusyons of the deuyll.
2. Addiction to strange fancies; eccentricity, oddity; an instance of this.
1581. Mulcaster, Positions, xlv. (1887), 297. Is that point in suspition of any noueltie or fantasticallnes to haue wymen learned?
1630. R. Johnson, Relations of the Most Famous Kingdoms, etc., 266 Their … phantasticalnesse in apparall.
1653. H. Cogan, trans. Pinto’s Trav., lviii. 229. Six little girls danced with six of the oldest men that were in the room, which seemed to us a very pretty fantasticalness.
c. 1698. Locke, Conduct of the Understanding, § 34. We are taught to cloath our minds as we do our bodies, after the fashion in vogue, and it is accounted fantasticalness, or something worse, not to do so.
1821. Southey, in Life (1849), I. 39. Their mother was plainly crazed with hypochondriacism and fantasticalness.
1871. Hawthorne, Septimius (1879), 119. The fantasticalness of his present pursuit.
3. Absurd unreality.
1847. De Quincey, Schlosser’s Lit. Hist., Wks. VIII. 55. Chloes and Corydons—names that proclaim the fantasticalness of the life with which they are … associated.
† 4. Capriciousness, whimsicality; waywardness.
1583. Golding, Calvin on Deut. xxiii. 139. The wicked Fantasticalnesse of men in worshipping the sunne.
1678. Otway, Friendship in F., IV. i. The fantasticalness of your appetite.
