use its discoveries
always accord subsequently 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 al