XII. Moral Imagination Darwinism and Morality

Now man produces concrete representations from out of the sum of his Ideas by means of the imagination. Hence what the free spirit needs in order to realize his Ideas, in order to assert himself in the world, is moral imagination. This is the source of the free spirit's action. Only those men, therefore, who are endowed with moral imagination are, properly speaking, morally productive. Those who merely preach morality, i.e., those who merely excogitate moral rules without being able to condense them into concrete representations, are morally unproductive. They are like those critics who can explain very reasonably how a work of art ought to be made, but who are themselves incapable of the smallest artistic production.