TION OF CROWDS

The modern imagination takes, speaking roughly, three characteristic
forms:

1. Imagination about the unseen or intangible--the spiritual--as
especially typified in electricity, in the wireless telegraph, the
aeroplane: a new and extraordinary sense of the invisible and the
unproved as an energy to be used and reckoned with.

2. Imagination about the future--a new and extraordinary sense of what
is going to happen next in the world.

3. Imagination about people. We are not only inventing new machines, but
our new machines have turned upon us and are creating new men. The
telephone changes the structure of the brain. Men live in wider
distances, and think in larger figures, and become eligible to nobler
and wider motives.

Imagination about the unseen is going to give us in an incredible degree
the mastery of the spirit over matter.

Imagination about the future is going to make the next few hundred years
an organic part of every man's life to-day.

The imagination of men about themselves and other people is going to
give us a race of men with new motives; or, to put it differently, it is
going to give us not only new sizes but new kinds of men. People are
going to achieve impossibilities in goodness, and our inventions in
human nature are going to keep up with our other inventions.

CHAPTER VII

IMAGINATION ABOUT THE UNSEEN

The most distinctively modern thing that ever happened was when Benjamin
Franklin went out one day and called down lightning from heaven. Before
that, power had always been dug up, or scraped off the ground. The more
power you wanted the more you had to get hold of the ground and dig for
it; and the more solid you were, the more heavy, solid things you could
get, the more you could pull solid, heavy things round in this world
where you wanted them. Franklin turned to the sky, and turned power on
from above, and decided that the real and the solid and the substantial
in this world was to be pulled about by the Invisible.

Copernicus had the same idea, of course, when he fared forth into space,
and discovered the centre of all power to be in the sun. It grieved
people a good deal to find how much more important the sky was than they
were, and their whole little planet with all of them on it. The idea
that that big blue field up there, empty by day and with such crowds of
little faint dots in it all night, was the real thing--the big, final,
and important thing--