in vain. But you will find that in practice, in action, in
business, imagination is a most useful faculty, and is so much
mental capital, whensoever it is properly trained. Consider but
this one thing, that without imagination no man can possibly invent
even the pettiest object; that it is one of the faculties which
essentially raises man above the brutes, by enabling him to create
for himself; that the first savage who ever made a hatchet must have
imagined that hatchet to himself ere he began it; that every new
article of commerce, every new opening for trade, must be arrived at
by acts of imagination; by the very same faculty which the poet or
the painter employs, only on a different class of objects; remember
that this faculty is present in some strength in every mind of any
power, in every mind which can do more than follow helplessly in the
beaten track, and do nothing but what it has seen others do already:
and then see whether it be not worth while to give the young a study
which above all others is fitted to keep this important and
universal faculty in health. Now, from fifty to five-and-twenty
years ago, under the influence of the Franklin and Edgeworth school
of education, imagination was at a discount. That school was a good
school enough: but here was one of its faults. It taught people to
look on imagination as quite a useless, dangerous, unpractical, bad
thing, a sort of mental disease. And now, as is usual after an
unfair depreciation of anything, has come a revolution; and an
equally unfair glorifying of the imagination; the present generation
have found out suddenly that the despised faculty is worth
something, and therefore are ready to believe it worth everything;
so that nowadays, to judge from the praise heaped on some poets, the
mere possession of imagination, however ill regulated, will atone
for every error of false taste, bad English, carelessness for truth;
and even for coarseness, blasphemy, and want of common morality; and