ABSTRACT
Irving Babbitt attributes decisive importance to the imagination in the shaping of man's understanding of life. The imagination usually works in spurts and at the mercy of pressing practical needs. In the poetically inclined and gifted person, on the other hand, the imagination may detach itself from service to impulses of the moment and swell into an elaborate, finely harmonized vision of life. The ultimate reality in which man participates through ethical action he can also know intuitively through this highest form of imagination the moral imagination "imitates the universal." Benedetto Croce teaches about the historian that he should have plenty of imagination and a capacity for keen philosophical thought. If the imagination is truly poetic, then, by definition, the only "truth" that can be legitimately asked for is poetic truth; and poetic truth is but another term for poetry being poetic.
