Rationality and Imagination in Cultural History: A Reply to Wayne Booth

Wayne Booth is quite right: for all my interest in the methods of literary criticism, I say nothing about method in my two historical books, The Mirror and the Lamp and Natural Supernaturalism. The reason for my silence on this issue is simple: these books were not written with any method in mind. Instead they were conceived, researched, worked out, put together, pulled apart, and put back together, not according to a theory of valid procedures in such undertakings, but by intuition. I relied, that is, on my sense of rightness and wrongness, of doubt and assurance, of deficiencies and superfluities, of what is appropriate and what is inappropriate. I should like to think that these intuitions were the kind that Coleridge describes, which follow from