The modern imagination takes, speaking roughly, three characteristic
forms:

1. Imagination about the unseen or intangible--the spiritual--as
especially typified in electricity, in the wireless telegraph, the
aeroplane: a new and extraordinary sense of the invisible and the
unproved as an energy to be used and reckoned with.

2. Imagination about the future--a new and extraordinary sense of what
is going to happen next in the world.

3. Imagination about people. We are not only inventing new machines, but
our new machines have turned upon us and are creating new men. The
telephone changes the structure of the brain. Men live in wider
distances, and think in larger figures, and become eligible to nobler
and wider motives.

Imagination about the unseen is going to give us in an incredible degree
the mastery of the spirit over matter.

Imagination about the future is going to make the next few hundred years
an organic part of every man's life to-day.

The imagination of men about themselves and other people is going to
give us a race of men with new motives; or, to put it differently, it is
going to give us not only new sizes but new kinds of men. People are
going to achieve impossibilities in goodness, and our inventions in
human nature are going to keep up with our other inventions.