My aim in this essay is to engage in a philosophical exploration of the creative imagination in human beings, seeking to discern both its basic structure and its special significance for understanding what it means to be human. For it is unique in the universe, so far as we know it, to human beings: God and angels are certainly creative, but by pure intelligence, without images; animals have imagination, but principally reproductive, to conserve images of past experience, not creative, save to a very limited degree, always tied down to present particular experiences and concrete problems. Humans, on the other hand, enjoy a far wider scope of creative imagination, due partly to the power of human intelligence to abstract, and so break free of the concrete material present we find ourselves situated in — which animals cannot do — and partly from the freedom which our imagination participates in because of its association with the free will of the human spirit.