To take a broad sweep, the Inkling’s project revolved around the relation and tension between rationality and imagination. The Inkling’s were reacting against the hyper-rationality in England in their time, as exemplified through World War I and II, and taking cues from the Romantics to argue for the value of imagination. However, the argument was never for imagination instead of rationality, but the inter-relational dance between both rational faculties and imaginative faculties as two avenues in pursuit of truth. Of the four primary Inkling members, Owen Barfield provided the most developed theoretical treatment of the truth giving potentialities of imagination.
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