material; achievement, the enduring, is immaterial. The products of
achievement are not material things at all. They are not ends, but means.
They are methods, ways, devices, arts, systems, institutions. In a word,
they are _inventions_." In short, to say that one is an inventor is but
another way of saying that he has imagination.

It is one thing to know facts but quite another thing to know the
significance of facts. And imagination is the alembic that discovers the
significance of the facts. A thousand men of England knew the facts
touching the life and education of the children of that country, but the
facts remained mere facts until the imagination of Dickens interpreted
them and thus emancipated childhood from the thralldom of ignorance and
cruelty. A thousand men knew the fact touching the steam that issues from
the tea-kettle, but not until Watts discovered the significance of the
fact did the tea-kettle become the precursor of the steam-engine that has
transformed civilization. It required the imagination of Newton to
interpret the falling of the apple and to cause this simple, common fact
to lead on to the discovery of the great truth of gravitation. Had Galileo
lacked imagination, the chandelier might have kept on swinging but the
discovery of the rotation of the earth would certainly have been
postponed.

In this view of the matter we can see one of the weaknesses of some of the
work in our colleges as well as in other schools. The teachers are fertile
in arriving at facts, but seem to think their tasks completed with these
discoveries and so proclaim the discovery of facts to be education. It
matters not that the facts are devoid of significance to their students,
they simply proceed to the discovery of more facts. They combine two or
more substances in a test-tube and thus produce a new substance. This fact
is solemnly inscribed in a notebook and the incident is closed. But the
student who has imagination and industry inquires "What then?" and
proceeds with investigations on his own initiative that result in a
positive boon to humanity. Imagination takes the facts and makes something
of them, while the college teacher has disclosed his inability to cope
with his own students in fields that only imagination can render
productive.

To quote Henderson once again: "In most of our current education, instead
of cultivating so valuable a quality, we have stupidly done all that we
can to suppress it. We have