The imaginative phase is altogether independent and autonomous with respect to the intellectual, which is not only incapable of endowing it with any fresh perfection but can only destroy it. "The studies of Metaphysics and Poetry are in natural opposition one to the other; for the former purges the mind of childish prejudice and the latter immerses and drowns it in the same: the former offers resistance to the judgement of the senses, while the latter makes this its chief rule: the former debilitates, the latter strengthens, imagination: the former prides itself in not turning spirit into body, the latter does its utmost to give a body to spirit: hence the thoughts of the former must necessarily be abstract, while the concepts of the latter show best when most clothed with matter: to sum up, the former strives that the learned may know the truth of things stripped of all passion: the latter that the vulgar may act truly by means of intense excitement of the senses, without which stimulant they assuredly would not act at all. Hence from all time, in all languages known to man, never has there been a strong man equally great as metaphysician and poet: such a poet as Homer, father and prince of poetry."[3] Poets are the senses, philosophers the intellect, of mankind.[4] Imagination is "stronger in proportion as reason is weaker."[5] No doubt "reflexion" may be put in verse; but it does not become poetry thereby. "Abstract sentences belong to philosophers, since they contain universals; and reflexions concerning such passions are made by poets who are false and frigid."[6] Those poets "who sing of the beauty and virtue of ladies by reflexion ... are philosophers arguing in verses or in love-rhymes."[7] One set of ideas belongs to philosophers, another to poets: these latter are identical with those of painters, from which "they differ only in colours and words."[8] Great poets are born not in epochs of reflexion but in those of imagination, generally called barbarous: Homer, in the barbarism of antiquity: Dante in that of the Middle Ages, the "second barbarism of Italy."[9] Those who have chosen to read philosophic reason into the verse of the great father of Greek poetry have transferred the character of a later age into an earlier, since the era of poets precedes that of philosophers and countries in infancy were sublime poets. Poetic locutions arose before prose, "by the necessity of nature" not "by caprice of pleasure"; fables or imaginative universals were conceived before reasoned, _i.e._ philosophical universals.[10]