The conception of imagination as purely sensuous shows strongly in Muratori, who is so convinced that the faculty, if left to itself, would deteriorate into a riot of dreams and intoxication, that he links it to intellect as to "an authoritative friend" who shall influence the choice and combination of images.[54] The problem of the nature of imagination had strong attraction for Muratori, and, while traducing and vilifying, he returns to it again in his _Della forza della fantasia umana_;[55] describing it as a material faculty essentially different from the mental or spiritual, and denying it the validity of knowledge. Although he had observed that the aim of poetry is distinct from that of science, in that the latter seeks to "know," and the former to "represent" truth,[56] he persisted in counting Poetry as an "art of delectation" subordinate to Moral Philosophy, of whom she was one of the three servants or ministers.[57] Very similarly Gravina held that along with novelty and delight in the marvellous, poetry should endow the mind of the vulgar with "truth and universal cognitions."[58]
Outside Italy the same movement was going on. Bacon, although he assigned poetry to imagination, yet considered it as something intermediary between history and science, approximating epic to history and the most lofty style, the parabolic, to science: ("_poēsis parabolica inter reliquas eminet"._) Elsewhere he calls poetry _somnium_ or declares absolutely that "_scientias fere non parit,_" and that "_pro lusu potius ingenii quam pro scientia est habenda_": music, painting and sculpture are voluptuous arts.[59] Addison identified the pleasures of the imagination with those produced by visible objects or the ideas to which they give rise: such pleasures are not so strong as those of the senses nor so refined as those of the intellect: he groups together the pleasures experienced respectively in comparing imitations with the objects imitated, and in sharpening by this means the faculty of observation.[60]
The sensationalism of Du Bos and other upholders of feeling appears very clearly. For Du Bos art is a pastime whose pleasantness consists in the fact that it occupies the mind without fatigue, and has affinities with the pleasure provoked by gladiatorial contests, bullfights and tourneys.[61]