At the start we are guided by an end or ideal of what we would bring
about. To a being destitute of self-consciousness only a single sort
of action is at any moment possible. When a certain force falls upon
it, it meets with a fixed response. Or, if the causative forces are
many, what happens is but the well-established resultant of these
forces operating upon a being as definite in nature as they. Such a
being contemplates no future to be reached through motions set up
within it. Its motions do not occur for the sake of realizing in
coming time powers as yet but half-existent. It is not guided by
ideals. Its actions set forth merely what it steadily is, not what it
might be. Something like the opposite of all this shapes personal
acts. A person has imagination. He contemplates future events as
possible before they occur, and this contemplation is one of the very
factors which bring them about. For example: while writing here, I can
emancipate my thought from this present act and set myself to
imagining my situation an hour hence. At that time I perceive I may be
still at my writing-desk, I may be walking the streets, I may be at
the theatre, or calling on my friend. A dozen, a hundred, future
possibilities are depicted as open to me. On one or another of these I
fix my attention, thereby giving it a causal force over other present
ideas, and rendering its future realization likely.

So enormously important is imagination. By it we effect our
emancipation from the present. Without this power to summon pictures
of situations which at present are not, we should be exactly like the
things or brutes already described. For in the thing a determined
sequence follows every impulse. There is no ambiguous future
disclosed, no variety of possibilities, no alternatives. Present
things under definite causes have but a single issue; and if the