  The emphasis on the imagination seems to have been the central issue in Bodmer and Breitinger’s dispute with Gottsched, which came to a head in Breitinger’s own Critische Dichtkunst, published in 1740 with a forward by Bodmer.  Because they shared with Gottsched the general assumption that art is based on the imitation of nature and has the goal of making important moral truths come alive for us, it is hard to see exactly what divided the two sides in this dispute, but the key seems to lie in their conception of poetic fables. As we saw, Gottsched believed that a poetic fable describes events in a possible rather than in the actual world, but he insists that the laws of nature and human nature must remain constant: thus a poetic fable can depict a hero who never existed, and make some moral truth alive to us through its depiction of this possible rather than actual hero, but everything about this hero and his world should still be natural. Bodmer and Breitinger, however, as advocates of Shakespeare and Milton, believed that important moral truths could be made alive to us through works of the poetic imagination that depart more drastically from actual nature and history. They held that novelty is an especially powerful source of aesthetic pleasure and thus an especially powerful means of making moral truths come alive, and for this reason they concluded that “since the most ancient times” the fable has been the means “for bringing the most useful but at the same time best known moral truths home to us in a pleasing way” (Breitinger, Critische Dichtkunst, cited from Dichtungstheorien der Aufklärung, p. 42). Their idea is that the more imaginative inventions of the poets—the Satan of Milton or the Caliban of Shakespeare rather than the more human heroes of Racine and Corneille admired by Gottsched—make moral truths appear more alive precisely by their attention-grabbing departure from the familiar creatures of the real world. Thus Bodmer and Breitinger thought that the moralistic aim of poetry that they accepted in common with Gottsched could be better achieved by a freer use of the imagination in poetry than Gottsched was prepared to allow. They agreed in their philosophical analysis of the ends of art but disagreed in their empirical assessment of its most effective means.