For the Romantics, then, the ultimate foundation for truth was neither the senses (empiricism) nor reason (rationalism) but the creative imagination. They conceived of the imagination as an autonomous power “immune to any outside force,” explains Alan Jacobs of Baylor University; it “generates its own distinctive kind of truth unchallengeable by other kinds of truth.” Words like autonomous, immune, and unchallengeable should set your idol detector beeping. The Romantics were claiming that the imagination generates ultimate truth. It “performs a number of functions formerly reserved for God
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