question of size. Decrease the scale of the picture, and the

impossible becomes possible at once. All fancies are not so easily
reducible to actual facts as the one we have taken, but all,

perhaps, eventually may be explicable in the same general way. At
present we certainly cannot affirm that anything may not be thus

explained. For the actual is widening its field every day. Even in
this little world of our own we are daily discovering to be fact

what we should have thought fiction, like the sailor's mother the
tale of the flying fish. Beyond it our ken is widening still more.

Gulliver's travels may turn out truer than we think. Could we
traverse the inter-planetary ocean of ether, we might eventually

find in Jupiter the land of Lilliput or in Ceres some old-time
country of the Brobdignagians. For men constituted muscularly like

ourselves would have to be proportionately small in the big planet
and big in the small one. Still stranger things may exist around

other suns. In those bright particular stars--which the little girl
thought pinholes in the dark canopy of the sky to let the glory

beyond shine through--we are finding conditions of existence like
yet unlike those we already know. To our groping speculations of

the night they almost seem, as we gaze on them in their twinkling,
to be winking us a sort of comprehension. Conditions may exist

there under which our wildest fancies may be commonplace facts.
There may be

"Some Xanadu where Kublai can
a stately pleasure dome decree,"

and carry out his conceptions to his own disillusionment, perhaps.
For if the embodiment of a fancy, however complete, left nothing

further to be wished, imagination would have no incentive to work.
Coleridge's distinction does very well to separate, empirically,

certain kinds of imaginative concepts from certain others; but it
has no real foundation in fact. Nor presumably did he mean it to

have. But it serves, not inaptly, as a text to point out an
important scientific truth, namely, that there are not two such

qualities of the mind, but only one. For otherwise we might have
supposed the fact too evident to need mention. Imagination is the

single source of the new, the one mainspring of psychical advance;
reason, like a balance-wheel, only keeping the action regular.

For reason is but the touchstone of experience, our own, inherited,
or acquired from others. It compares what we imagine with what we

know, and gives us answer in terms of the here and the now, which
we call the actual. But the actual is really nothing but the local.

It does not mark the limits of the possible.
That imagination has been the moving spirit of the psychical world

is evident, whatever branch of human thought we are pleased to
examine. We are in the habit, in common parlance, of making a

distinction between the search after truth and the search after
beauty, calling the one science and the other art. Now while we are

not slow to imputeimagination to art, we are by no means so ready
to appreciate its connection with science. Yet contrary, perhaps,

to exogeric ideas on the subject, it is science rather than art that
demands imagination of her votaries. Not that art may not involve

the quality to a high degree, but that a high degree of art is quite
compatible with a very small amount of imagination. On the one side

we may instancepainting. Now painting begins its career in the
humble capacity of copyist, a pretty poor copyist at that. At first

so slight was its skill that the rudest symbols sufficed.
"This is a man" was conventionally implied by a few scratches

bearing a very distant relationship to the real thing. Gradually,
owing to human vanity and a growing taste, pictures improved.

Combinations were tried, a bit from one place with a piece from
another; a sort of mosaic requiring but a slight amount of

imagination. Not that imagination of a higher order has not been
called into play, although even now pictures are often happy

adaptations rather than creations proper. Some masters have been
imaginative; others, unfortunately for themselves and still more for

the public, have not. For that the art may attain a high degree of
excellence for itself and much distinction for its professors,

without calling in the aid of imagination, is evident enough on this
side of the globe, without travelling to the other.

Take, on the other hand, a branch of science which, to the average
layman, seems peculiarly" target="_blank" title="ad.特有地；古怪地">peculiarly unimaginative, the science of mathematics.

Yet at the risk of appearing to cast doubts upon the validity of its
conclusions, it might be called the most imaginative product of

human thought; for it is simply one vast imagination based upon a
few so-called axioms, which are nothing more nor less than the

results of experience. It is none the less imaginative because its
discoveries always accordsubsequently with fact, since man was not

aware of them beforehand. Nor are its inevitable conclusions
inevitable to any save those possessed of the mathematician's

prophetic sight. Once discovered, it requires much less imagination
to understand them. With the light coming from in front, it is an

easy matter to see what lies behind one.
So with other fabrics of human thought, imagination has been

spinning and weaving them all. From the most concrete of inventions
to the most abstract of conceptions the same force reveals itself

upon examination; for there is no gulf between what we call practical
and what we consider theoretical. Everything abstract is ultimately

of practical use, and even the most immediately utilitarian has an
abstract principle at its core. We are too prone to regard the

present age of the world as preeminently practical, much as a
middle-aged man laments the witching fancies of his boyhood. But,

and there is more in the parallel than analogy, if the man be truly
imaginative he is none the less so at forty-five than he was at

twenty, if his imagination have taken on a more critical form;
for this latter half of the nineteenth century is perhaps the most

imaginative period the world's history has ever known. While with
one hand we are contriving means of transit for our ideas, and even

our very voices, compared to which Puck's girdle is anything but
talismanic, with the other we are stretching out to grasp the action

of mind on mind, pushing our way into the very realm of mind itself.
History tells the same story in detail; for the history of mankind,

imperfectly as we know it, discloses the fact that imagination,
and not the power of observation nor the kindred capability of

perception, has been the cause of soul-evolution.
The savage is but little of an imaginative being. We are tempted,

at times, to imagine him more so than he is, for his fanciful
folk-lore. The proof of which overestimation is that we find no

difficulty in imagining what he does, and even of imagining what he
probably imagined, and finding our suppositions verified by

discovery. Yet his powers of observation may be marvellously
developed. The North American Indian tracks his foe through the

forest by signs unrecognizable to a white man, and he reasons most
astutely upon them, and still that very man turns out to be a mere

child when put before problems a trifle out of his beaten path.
And all because his forefathers had not the power to imagine

something beyond what they actually saw. The very essence of the
force of imagination lies in its ability to change a man's habitat

for him. Without it, man would forever have remained, not a mollusk,
to be sure, but an animal simply. A plant cannot change its place,

an animal cannot alter its conditions of existence except within
very narrow bounds; man is free in the sense nothing else in the

world is.
What is true of individuals has been true of races. The most

imaginative races have proved the greatest factors in the world's
advance.

Now after this look at our own side of the world, let us turn to
the other; for it is this very psychological fact that mental

progression implies an ever-increasing individualization, and that
imagination is the force at work in the process which Far Eastern

civilization, taken in connection with our own, reveals. In doing
this, it explains incidentally its own seeming anomalies, the most

unaccountable of which, apparently, is its existence.
We have seen how impressively impersonal the Far East is. Now if

individuality be the natural measure of the height of civilization
which a nation has reached, impersonality should betoken a

relatively laggard position in the race. We ought, therefore, to
find among these people certain other characteristics corroborative

of a less advanced state of development. In the first place,
if imagination be the impulse of which increase in individuality is

the resulting motion, that quality should be at a minimum there.