us by the master minds of the ages. Anything less than this, and we are no longer
dealing with literature, but with words—like musical sounds which deal with no
theme, or like picture frames in which no picture has been set. Nor is the case
different in listening to a speaker. His words are to you only so many sensations
of sounds of such and such pitches and intensities and quality, unless your mind
keeps pace with his and continually builds the pictures which fill his thought as
he speaks. Lacking imagination, the sculptures of Michael Angelo and the
pictures of Raphael are to you so many pieces of curiously shaped marble and
ingeniously colored canvas. What the sculptor and the painter have placed before
you must suggest to you images and thoughts from your own experience, to fill
out and make alive the marble and the canvas, else to you they are dead.
Imagination and Science.—Nor is imagination less necessary in other lines of
study. Without this power of building living, moving pictures out of images,
there is small use to study science beyond what is immediately present to our
senses; for some of the most fundamental laws of science rest upon conceptions
which can be grasped only as we have the power of imagination. The student
who cannot get a picture of the molecules of matter, infinitely close to each other
and yet never touching, all in vibratory motion, yet each within its own orbit,
each a complete unit in itself, yet capable of still further division into smaller
particles,—the student who cannot see all this in a clear visual image can never
at best have more than a most hazy notion of the theory of matter. And this
means, finally, that the explanations of light and heat and sound, and much
besides, will be to him largely a jumble of words which linger in his memory,
perchance, but which never vitally become a possession of his mind.
So with the world of the telescope. You may have at your disposal all the
magnificent lenses and the accurate machinery owned by modern observatories;
but if you have not within yourself the power to build what these reveal to you,
and what the books tell you, into the solar system and still larger systems, you
can never study astronomy except in a blind and piecemeal sort of way, and all
the planets and satellites and suns will never for you form themselves into a
system, no matter what the books may say about it.
Everyday Uses of Imagination.—But we may consider a still more practical
phase of imagination, or at least one which has more to do with the humdrum
daily life of most of us. Suppose you go to your milliner and tell her how you
want your spring hat shaped and trimmed. And suppose you have never been
able to see this hat in toto in your mind, so as to get an idea of how it will look
when completed, but have only a general notion, because you like red velvet,