ABSTRACT
Rationalism in ethics, as defined by Irving Babbitt, includes inadequate appreciation of the role of ethical volition and ethical imagination in the search for truth and reality. The assumption of ethical rationalism is that purely conceptual, philosophic thought is enough to ensure right conduct. Babbitt stresses continuous exercise of the higher will and the attendant development of ethical imagination. Babbitt is more realistic in stressing the inability of reason to withstand the concerted pull of the desires and the imagination. The education of the will, Babbitt argues, should go hand in hand with the of the education imagination. The intuitive truth of the ethical imagination is the basis for all other knowledge. Babbitt's explication of the relationship between imagination and will, as joined to Croce's logic, demonstrates the ultimate dependence of philosophical knowledge on moral character. Both Benedetto Croce and Babbitt reject the Socratic view that virtue is knowledge.
