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 impute
imagination 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 instance painting. 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 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 beca