ordinary emotions lose their foundation. A desire that arises from an imaginative thought is not a real desire: and without real desire, there is no real emotion. I no more desire Othello not to murder Desdemona than I desire to leave the theatre, even though murder is, in this imaginary world, as terrible as murders really are. In such a case desire is not felt, but"entertained', just as the thought of what is happening is not believed but held in In a sense it is even wrong to say that itisI who feel grief over Desdemona's fate. I imagine such a grief, and am drawn into sympathy with the thing that limagine. We might say that there is neither real object nor real feeling, but a response in imagination to an imagined scene. In fantasy, by contrast, there is a real feeling which fixes upon an unreal object, in order to gratify vicariously what cannot be gratified in fact. Since imaginative emotions are responses, they are deter mined by their imaginary objects. They arise out of, and are con trolled by, an understanding of the world. And to exercise this understanding is to take an interest in truth. The questions arise: are things really like that? Is it plausible? Is my response exaggerated? Am I being invited to feel what I should not feel? Such questions are the life of imagination, and also the death of fantasy, which as soon as its object is granted independent life or subjected to interrogation. For similar reasons, we can say that"realisation', the creation of a surrogate or simulacrum, is not the main aim of imaginative thought, and may even impede it. The imagination, governed as it is by a sense of reality, seeks condensation, suggestion, dramatic com The absolute realisation of specific scenes is no part of the imaginative purpose, which is better served by convention than explicit imagery But although imagination is, in this way, informed by a sense of reality, it need not represent the world asit is. On the contrary the imagination idealises, ennobles, embellishes and re-presents the world. And it does so in a believable way, since(parapend belief only in the presence of the doxically) we can sus believable. Aristotle made the point in the Portia, Poetry, he argued, does not tolerate the improbable, but it can tolerate the