The great instrument of moral good is the imagination

The following excerpt from 'How We Live' is so inspiring and I would like to share it with you.

'Imagination enables us to understand one another, and through the understanding to feel love. Love, in turn, is the basis of morality. Here is the writings of a young English poet, Percy Bysshe Shelly, in A Defence of Poetry.

The great secret of morals is love; or a going out of our own nature, and an identification of ourselves with the beautiful which exists in thought, action, or person, not our own. A man to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and of many others; the pains and pleasures of his species must become his own.

He is telling us that without imagination of another's mind there can be no understanding of that other and therfore no love, and without love, there can be no morality. '

Reference:

Nuland (1997), How We Live, p. 141, Vintage, U.S.