element in great constructive thinking; for while we may have thoughts
untouched by the imagination, one cannot think along high constructive
lines without its constant aid. Isolated thoughts come unattended by
it, but the thinking which issues in organised systems, in
comprehensive interpretations of things and events, in those noble
generalisations which have the splendour of the discovery of new
worlds in them, in those concrete embodiments of idea which we call
works of art, is conditioned on the use of the imagination. Plato's
Dialogues were fashioned by it as truly as Homer's poems; Hegel's
philosophy was created by it as definitely as Shakespeare's plays,
and Newton and Kepler used it as freely as Dante or Rembrandt.

Upon the use of this supreme faculty we depend not only for creative
power, but for education in the highest sense of the word; for culture
is the highest result of education, and the final test of education is
its power to produce culture. Goethe was in the habit of saying that
sympathy is essential to all true criticism; for no man can discern
the heart of a movement, of a work of art, or of a race who does not
put himself into heart relations with that which he is trying to
understand. We never really possess an idea, a bit of knowledge, or a
fact of experience until we get below the mind of it into the heart of
it. Now, sympathy in this sense is the imagination touched with
feeling; it is the imagination bringing thought and emotion into vital
relation. In the process of culture, therefore, the imagination plays
a great part; for culture, it cannot too often be said, is knowledge,
observation, and experience incorporate into personality and become
part of the very nature of the individual. The man of culture is
pre-eminently a man of imagination; lacking this quality, he may
become learned by force of industry, or a scholar by virtue of a
trained intelligence, but the ripeness, the balance, the peculiar