ABSTRACT

The imagination is indispensable to the well-being of society. It is the faculty within the mind that determines the ethical content of action and ultimately impels the individual and civilization forward, for better or worse. A proper understanding of human nature must begin with the imagination. The imagination is the distance between immediate perception and response, enabling human beings to use history to reflect upon the present. As the imagination plays such a pivotal role in human affairs, civilization is administered as much by the fiction of artists as it is by the rhetoric of politicians. "Reality" is a subjective construct manufactured by each individual imagination, the ethical content of which determines if the "reality" apprehended by the individual reflects the circumstances of actual human experience or of some rainbow hallucination. Ultimately, the moral imagination is essential to the preservation of civilization because it provides genuine definition of reality that enables us to view the world with clarity and depth.