ABSTRACT
Irving Babbitt uses the term "imaginative perception of the universal" to describe concrete intuitive experience of the essential reality of life. Babbitt has less to say about the fact that, having grasped the universal imaginatively, or realized it in practice, men may proceed to formulate it conceptually, as did Aristotle, for instance, in the Nicomachean Ethics. There exists an imaginative awareness of universalia, a poetic wisdom or "philosophy" which is distinct from philosophy proper. In aesthetic theories scorned by Benedetto Croce as "intellectualistic" there is often just beneath the surface that awareness of imaginative truth which was to be rediscovered by Croce himself. Sophocles is more ethical than Euripides for the simple reason that he views life with more imaginative wholeness. The critic is providing a statement regarding the imaginative depth of the poem. Aristotle's text has "universals" in the plural, whereas Babbitt speaks of "imaginative perception of the universal."
