oming in England
as fast as we make Democracy as democratic as it is in America. This is
true also of popular religion: it is so horribly irreligious that nobody
with the smallest pretence to culture, or the least inkling of what
the great prophets vainly tried to make the world understand, will have
anything to do with it except for purely secular reasons.

Imagination

Before we can clearly understand how baleful is this condition of
intimidation in which we live, it is necessary to clear up the confusion
made by our use of the word imagination to denote two very different
powers of mind. One is the power to imagine things as they are not:
this I call the romantic imagination. The other is the power to imagine
things as they are without actually sensing them; and this I will call
the realistic imagination. Take for example marriage and war. One man
has a vision of perpetual bliss with a domestic angel at home, and of
flashing sabres, thundering guns, victorious cavalry charges, and routed
enemies in the field. That is romantic imagination; and the mischief it
does is incalculable. It begins in silly and selfish expectations of
the impossible, and ends in spiteful disappointment, sour grievance,
cynicism, and misanthropic resistance to any attempt to better a
hopeless world. The wise man knows that imagination is not only a means
of pleasing himself and beguiling tedious hours with romances and fairy
tales and fools' paradises (a quite defensible and delightful amusement
when you know exactly what you are doing and where fancy ends and facts
begin), but also a means of foreseeing and being prepared for realities
as yet unexperienced, and of testing the possibility and desirability of
serious Utopias. He does not expect his wife to be an angel; nor does he
overlook the facts that war depends on the rousing of all the murderous
blackguardism still latent in mankind; that every victory means a
defeat; that fatigue, hunger, terror, and disease are the raw material
which romancers work up into military glory; and that soldiers for the
most part go to war as children go to school, because they are afraid
not to. They are afraid even to say they are afraid, as such candor is
punishable by death in the military code.

A very little realistic imagination gives an ambitious person enormous
power over the multitudinous victims of the romantic imagination. For
the romancer not only pleases himself with fictitious glories: