THE UNIVERSITY I 
 
 GF CAUrOKWiA, SWi 
 LA *
 
 THE CULTIVATION AND 
 USE OF IMAGINATION 
 
 BY THE RIGHT HON. 
 
 GEORGE JOACHIM GOSCHEN, M.P. 
 
 LONDON 
 EDWARD ARNOLD 
 
 37 BEDFORD STREET, W. C. 
 
 lisijer to tfje 5nWa ffice 
 1893 
 
 [All rights reserved]
 
 PREFACE 
 
 HAVING been asked to sanction the re-publica- 
 tion of the two addresses contained in this little 
 volume, I have cheerfully consented to their 
 being printed together, as in one sense, though 
 deh'vered with an interval of many years 
 between them, they form a connected whole. 
 The first deals with the cultivation of the 
 imagination, the second with its use in study 
 and in life. Of course, however, they overlap ; 
 and in the first address, as in the second, I 
 discuss the use of imagination in many spheres 
 of life. 
 
 The theories in both will be found to be ab- 
 solutely identical, but the form and style are 
 very different. The address to the students 
 of the Liverpool Institute is essentially a 
 speech, rough and rhetorical, and redolent of
 
 VI PREFACE 
 
 a more or less ex tempore treatment ; and I 
 have not found it possible, or indeed desirable, 
 to reduce it to essay form. The fervour of my 
 convictions on the immense value of the de- 
 velopment of the imaginative faculty affected 
 the style, and must be the apology for its 
 imperfections. 
 
 In my Rectorial address, on the other hand, 
 I was bound to observe a more academic tone, 
 and, while following out a cognate line of 
 thought, I attempted to give it a somewhat 
 more scientific and elaborate treatment. But 
 allowance being made for the difference in the 
 occasions, and in the audiences which called 
 forth those two addresses, I hope the reader 
 may nevertheless find in them an identity of 
 feeling reflecting my most earnest desire to 
 promote the cultivation of one side of our 
 human faculties, the neglect of which I con- 
 sider would be most harmful both in social 
 and national respects. 
 
 G. J. G. 
 
 April 1893.
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 THE CULTIVATION OF THE IMAGINATION, ... 9 
 THE USE OF IMAGINATION IN STUDY AND IN LIFE, . 51
 
 THE CULTIVATION OF THE 
 IMAGINATION 1 
 
 THE wide scope of this Institute offers a tempt- 
 ing choice of subjects to those who address 
 its students at these annual gatherings, and 
 speakers probably often take advantage of 
 the occasion to ventilate some educational 
 hobbies of their own. The presidents who have 
 taken this chair in succession have certainly 
 not all recommended the same kind of studies. 
 I have read some of the addresses which have 
 been delivered in previous years addresses 
 uttered by gentlemen who could speak with an 
 educational authority which I could not com- 
 mand. Some have passed useful and practical 
 
 1 An Address delivered before the Members of the Liverpool 
 Institute, Liverpool, November 29, 1877. Reprinted with altera- 
 tions.
 
 10 THE CULTIVATION OF THE IMAGINATION 
 
 criticisms on the books used by you and on 
 special courses of intellectual study. Others, 
 speaking with regard to Science and Art, have 
 given most valuable advice in connection with 
 those departments of this Institute which are 
 connected with South Kensington. I propose 
 a somewhat new departure ; I wish to speak to 
 you this evening as a man of business, but I 
 hope I may say as a man of business who knows 
 what he owes to a public school and University 
 education. 
 
 I am about, then, to address you as a man of 
 business, and, as I am speaking to the youth of 
 this business city of Liverpool, and am bound 
 to bear in mind that a great many of you are 
 connected with business of one kind or another, 
 I daresay you will expect that I am prepared 
 to make a good business-like speech ; that I am 
 about to recommend, in preference, the study 
 of modern languages, of book-keeping, and of 
 arithmetic ; and that I shall warn you against 
 those studies of which many people say ' What 
 is their use ? ' And perhaps you may think
 
 THE CULTIVATION OP THE IMAGINATION 1 1 
 
 that I shall wind up with some eloquent 
 generalisations, speak of the danger of foreign 
 competition with regard to our trade, point out 
 to you that you must increase your taste and 
 knowledge so as to be able to compete more 
 successfully with foreign countries ; and finally 
 appeal to you on behalf of technical education 
 and sweeping reforms in your commercial 
 schools. If you expect that such will be the 
 course I shall adopt this evening, possibly you 
 may be disappointed. I need not assure you 
 that I am conscious of your local surroundings. 
 I believe I know, or at least can imagine, the 
 future which many of you intend to carve out 
 for yourselves. I know the connection of 
 Liverpool, and of Liverpool men, with business ; 
 but, nevertheless, conscious as I am of these 
 considerations, I shall not hesitate to place 
 some opinions before you as regards certain 
 educational ideas and certain sides of training, 
 which may at first sight surprise you, but which 
 I shall nevertheless very confidently ask you 
 to lay to heart.
 
 12 THE CULTIVATION OF THE IMAGINATION 
 
 I wish to bring out very clearly a point of 
 view on which I have a strong feeling. I wish 
 to warn you of the danger of a too utilitarian 
 education, and to insist on other tests as to the 
 value of the instruction you receive besides its 
 direct and immediate bearing on your prospects 
 in life. If your aim in connection with this 
 Institute is mainly professional, even in the 
 best sense of the word if it is directed less to 
 your whole lives than to your careers if your 
 exclusive object is to qualify yourselves for 
 bread-winning a high and worthy object, but 
 not the only object of education even to the 
 poorest man ; if such are your aims, and the 
 aims of those who influence you, possibly there 
 will be some head-shaking over my address this 
 evening. For I stand here to plead a different 
 cause, though certainly not an antagonistic cause 
 to what I have described. I have read many 
 addresses on the subject of technical education 
 speeches in which useless branches of study 
 are denounced; and doubtless we have been 
 behindhand in many respects. We know the
 
 THE CULTIVATION OF THE IMAGINATION 13 
 
 splendid work done by many devoted friends of 
 education who are determined that the produc- 
 ing powers of this country shall not be ham- 
 pered in the race by the want of that special 
 knowledge and taste in which our neighbours 
 may be apt to outstrip us. I honour them, and 
 wish them ' God-speed ; ' but, at the same time, 
 I wish to remember that there is another side 
 yet to educational work. I hold that in intel- 
 lectual matters, as well as in religious life, man 
 cannot live on bread alone. I wish one of the 
 key-notes of what I may say to you this even- 
 ing to be that a livelihood is not a life. 
 Education must deal with your lives as well as 
 qualify you for your livelihoods. I think you 
 will hold that education must do more for you 
 than enable you to win your bread, outstrip 
 your neighbours, increase your business, and 
 enable you to marry and bring up a family. I 
 want education to ennoble, to brighten, and to 
 beautify your lives. I wish it to increase your 
 pleasures and your powers of happiness. I 
 wish it to multiply your resources. I wish
 
 14 THE CULTIVATION OF THE IMAGINATION 
 
 education to do that for the life which lies 
 beyond and outside of your own work which, 
 by common consent, it must do for your work 
 itself. And, therefore, while others plead on 
 behalf of useful knowledge and mind, I sym- 
 pathise with them as well I wish a hearing to 
 be also given to another side of education which 
 may not have an immediate marketable use, 
 but which, nevertheless, you cannot afford to 
 neglect. 
 
 I wish to speak to-night on behalf of the 
 cultivation of the imaginative faculties in the 
 broadest sense of the term ; and I am not afraid 
 to speak thus before a Liverpool audience and 
 as a business man, because I will not admit an 
 antagonism between business and cultivation : 
 I will not admit that the cultivation of the 
 imaginative faculties disqualifies men and women 
 for the practical duties of life. Indeed, I hold 
 that the cultivation of the imagination amongst 
 all classes whom such an education can reach, 
 is not only important to the young themselves 
 as increasing their happiness, but important to
 
 THE CULTIVATION OF THE IMAGINATION 15 
 
 the nation as qualifying them to become better 
 citizens and fitting them to take a useful and 
 noble part in our national duties. And I beg 
 the most humble and poorest amongst you not 
 to think I am going to talk over their heads 
 to-night. I address these words in favour of 
 the cultivation of the imagination to the poorest 
 and most humble in the same way that I 
 address them to the wealthiest and those who 
 have the best prospects in life. I will try not 
 to make the mistake which doctors commit 
 when they recommend patients in receipt of 2 
 a week to have recourse to champagne and a 
 short residence at the sea-side. 
 
 In what sense, then, do I use the word ima- 
 gination ? Johnson's Dictionary shall answer. 
 I wish you particularly to note the answer 
 Johnson gives as regards the meaning of 
 ' imagination.' He defines it as ' the power of 
 forming ideal pictures ; ' ' the power of repre- 
 senting absent things to ourselves and to 
 others.' Such is the power which I am going 
 to ask you to cultivate in your schools, by your
 
 16 THE CULTIVATION OF THE IMAGINATION 
 
 libraries, at home, by every influence which I 
 can gain for the cause ; and I hope I shall be 
 able to carry you with me, and show you why 
 you should cultivate that power. I repeat, it 
 is the power of forming ideal pictures, and of 
 representing absent things to yourselves and 
 to others. That is the sense in which I shall 
 use the word Imagination in the course of my 
 address. Now, follow out this thought, and I 
 think I can make my meaning clear. Absent 
 things ! Take history. History deals with the 
 things of the past. They are absent, in a sense, 
 from your minds that is to say, you cannot 
 see them; but the study of history qualifies 
 you and strengthens your capacity for under- 
 standing things that are not present to you, 
 and thus I wish to recommend history to you 
 as a most desirable course of study. Then, 
 again, take geography, travels in foreign coun- 
 tries. Here, again, you have matters which 
 are absent, in the physical sense, from you ; but 
 the study of travels will enable you to realise 
 things that are absent to your own minds.
 
 THE CULTIVATION OF THE IMAGINATION 17 
 
 And as for the power of forming ideal pictures, 
 there I refer you to poets, dramatists, and 
 imaginative writers, to the great literature of 
 all times and of all countries. Such studies as 
 these will enable you to live, and to move, and 
 to think, in a world different from the narrow 
 world by which you are surrounded. These 
 studies will open up to you sources of amuse- 
 ment which, I think I may say, will often rise 
 into happiness. I wish you, by the aid of the 
 training which I recommend, to be able to look 
 beyond your own lives, and have pleasure in 
 surroundings different from those in which you 
 move. I want you to be able mark this point 
 to sympathise with other times, to be able 
 to understand the men and women of other 
 countries, and to have the intense enjoyment 
 an enjoyment which, I am sure, you would all 
 appreciate of mental change of scene. I do 
 not only want you to know dry facts ; I am not 
 only looking to a knowledge of facts, nor chiefly 
 to that knowledge. I want the heart to be 
 stirred as well as the intellect. I want you to 
 
 B
 
 18 THE CULTIVATION OF THE IMAGINATION 
 
 feel more and live more than you can do if you 
 only know what surrounds yourselves. I want 
 the action of the imagination, the sympathetic 
 study of history and travels, the broad teaching 
 of the poets, and, indeed, of the best writers of 
 other times and other countries, to neutralise 
 and check the dwarfing influences of necessarily 
 narrow careers and necessarily stunted lives. 
 That is what I mean when I ask you to culti- 
 vate the imagination ! I want to introduce 
 you to other, wider, and nobler fields of thought, 
 and to open up vistas of other worlds, whence 
 refreshing and bracing breezes will stream upon 
 your minds and souls. 
 
 I reject the theory which regards as ' stuff 
 and nonsense ' all that does not really bear on 
 the immediate practical duties of life. I 
 struggle against the view which assails higher 
 and deeper, ay, and more amusing studies 
 with that shibboleth which we all know so well 
 ' What is the use of all this to us practical 
 men of business ? ' Mind, I do not decline that 
 challenge. I will speak of the use by-and-by.
 
 THE CULTIVATION OF THE IMAGINATION 19 
 
 I will show that the course of training I recom- 
 mend is of the greatest possible practical use ; 
 but meanwhile I lay in a protest that this is 
 not the only result by which training can be 
 tried. Its marketable use is not the only test, 
 or even the chief test, to which we ought to 
 look in education ; and I decline to have these 
 courses of studies simply tried by the bearing 
 they may have on the means of gaining a 
 livelihood. 
 
 And here I think you may fairly note the 
 difference between what I am asking you to do 
 and what many others ask you to do. While 
 I want you to acquire the power of representing 
 to yourselves absent things, many persons, with 
 more authority to speak than I have, beseech 
 you to study what lies around you. The pro- 
 moters of physical science, for instance, entreat 
 you not to neglect the phenomena which 
 surround you on every side, and ask you to 
 analyse Nature, to make use of Nature, to turn 
 Nature to your purposes, to your greater 
 comfort and power. It would be unjust if I
 
 20 THE CULTIVATION OF THE IMAGINATION 
 
 were to omit to say that they also recommend 
 the study of physical science for its ennobling 
 and educational influence on the mind ; and I 
 say all honour to these studies. But let another 
 field of work not be neglected the cultivation 
 of the power of forming ideal pictures and of 
 representing things absent to yourselves and 
 to others. 
 
 Nor do I believe for one moment I am 
 rather anxious on this point that the cultiva- 
 tion of this faculty will disgust you or disqualify 
 you for your daily tasks. I hold a very con- 
 trary view. I spoke just now of mental change 
 of scene ; and as the body is better for a change 
 of scene and a change of air, so I believe that 
 the mind is also better for occasional changes of 
 mental atmosphere. I do not believe that it is 
 good either for men or women always to be 
 breathing the atmosphere of the business in 
 which they are themselves engaged. You know 
 how a visit to the seaside sometimes brings 
 colour to the cheeks and braces the limbs. 
 Well, so I believe that that mental change of
 
 THE CULTIVATION OF THE IMAGINATION 21 
 
 scene which I recommend will bring colour into 
 your minds, will brace you to greater activity, 
 and will in every way strengthen both your 
 intellectual and your moral faculties. I want 
 you if I may use the phrase to breathe the 
 bracing ozone of the imagination. And over 
 what worlds will not fancy enable you to roam ? 
 the world of the past, ideal worlds, and other 
 worlds beyond your sight, probably brighter 
 worlds, possibly more interesting worlds than 
 the narrow world in which most of us are com- 
 pelled to live ; at all events, different worlds, 
 and worlds that give us change. 
 
 And now let me answer an objection which I 
 know is in all your minds, though you may be 
 too complimentary to give audible expression 
 to it. You are no doubt saying to yourselves, 
 'What in the name of common sense does Mr. 
 Goschen mean I If he thinks that the cultiva- 
 tion of the imagination be better than a know- 
 ledge of facts if it be better to analyse absent 
 things rather than study things present why, 
 then, not leave imagination to do its work ?
 
 22 THE CULTIVATION OP THE IMAGINATION 
 
 Our lads and lasses may like this idle doctrine 
 well enough, but why foist it on our business- 
 like Institute ? ' I will attempt to grapple with 
 this objection. But before I do so, I have got 
 one more preliminary remark to make. I am 
 so keen about the cultivation of the imagination- 
 that I wish to' press into its service, not only 
 the influence of an Institute like this, but home 
 influences the influence which fathers and 
 mothers may be able to bring to bear upon 
 their children the influence of every one who 
 has a library the influence of every one who 
 can speak to the young even pulpit influence 
 I would exhort to assist in this work, because 
 the cultivation of the imagination is certainly 
 on the side of religion and religious education. 
 
 And I want to begin very early. Full of my 
 wish to make all familiar with great worlds or 
 little worlds differing from their own, I hold 
 decided opinions even upon the subject of 
 nursery and school-boy literature. The imagi- 
 nation is roused even when children are very 
 young, and often the first lessons given to young
 
 THE CULTIVATION OF THE IMAGINATION 23 
 
 children are of great importance in their after 
 lives. You will expect, perhaps, that, with that 
 disregard of useful knowledge of which I may 
 stand accused, I am in favour of indiscriminate 
 story-books as appealing to the imagination, 
 and that I preach up the merits of works of 
 fiction promiscuously. This would not repre- 
 sent my feeling in the least. Works of fiction, 
 unfortunately, are frequently destitute of all 
 imagination. Many is the three-volume novel 
 which you can read through from beginning to 
 end, while your mind will not be lit up with one 
 spark of imagination. What do some of these 
 writers do ? They do that against which I 
 protest. I can bring out my hobby by enlarg- 
 ing on this point. They photograph daily life. 
 They do not introduce their readers to any- 
 thing beyond daily life. In fact, what course 
 do they take ? They describe characters pre- 
 cisely similar to the people whom they see every 
 day; they describe the very clothes worn by 
 the people whom you meet every day; they 
 describe the very words which may be addressed
 
 24 THE CULTIVATION OP THE IMAGINATION 
 
 to themselves ; the very smiles which may be 
 smiled at themselves ; they describe the very 
 love which they hope may be made to them- 
 selves or to their sisters ; and then, at the end, 
 they think they have written a novel ! Well, 
 that may be fiction, but it is not imagination. 
 Why, they have not ' the power to form ideal 
 pictures/ or ' to represent to themselves or to 
 others absent things/ They only deal with the 
 present. Such novelists do not carry their 
 readers to other worlds. They do not cultivate 
 the imagination. 
 
 What I want for the young are books and 
 stories which do not simply deal with our daily 
 life. I prefer ' Alice in Wonderland/ as a book 
 for children, to those little stories of ' Tommies' 
 and ' Freddies/ which are but little photographs 
 of the lives of ' Tommies ' and ' Freddies ' who 
 read the books. I like Grimm's ' Fairy Tales ' 
 better than little nursery novelettes. I like the 
 fancy even of little children to have some more 
 stimulating food than images of their own little 
 lives ; and I confess I am sorry for the children
 
 THE CULTIVATION OF THE IMAGINATION 25 
 
 whose imaginations are not sometimes bright- 
 ened by beautiful fairy tales, or by other tales 
 which carry them to different worlds from those 
 in which their future will be passed. Doubtless 
 boys and girls like photographs of the sayings 
 and doings of other boys and girls school life 
 sketched with realistic fidelity and doubtless 
 many young people like love-stories similar to 
 those through which they may have to pass 
 themselves. But there is little imagination in 
 all this. The facts are fictitious, but the life is 
 real. Do not misunderstand me. It is not 
 that I wish to combine instruction with amuse- 
 ment in what is often a hopeless alliance. I do 
 not wish to stint young people of amusing 
 books. But I will tell you what I do like for 
 boys and girls. I like to see boys and girls 
 amuse themselves with tales of adventure, with 
 stories of gallant deeds and noble men, with 
 stories of the seas, of mountains, of wars, with 
 descriptions of scenes different from those in 
 which they live. 
 
 But I will make an exception. Sometimes
 
 26 THE CULTIVATION OF THE IMAGINATION 
 
 contemporary stories are told with such genial 
 nobleness of aim, and with such purity of spirit, 
 that they are of high moral and mental value, 
 and certainly I should be sorry that a boy should 
 be denied the intense enjoyment of reading 
 ' Tom Brown's School Days/ nor would I grudge 
 a girl the deep pleasure and interest of reading 
 the fortunes of ' The Heir of Kedclyffe.' No 
 doubt stories of our daily lives may frequently 
 be made to answer great and noble purposes, 
 but still, as a general rule, and looking generally 
 to the literature for the young, I hold that what 
 removes them more or less from their daily life 
 is better than what reminds them of it at every 
 step. I like boys to read, for instance, the 
 ' Last of the Mohicans ' to sail across the sea 
 with Captain Marryat's tars. I like them to 
 read the tales of the Crusades, or of our own 
 Border wars books of travel in the North, the 
 Arctic Regions, in the South, the East, and the 
 West. I like them, in short, to read anything 
 rather than realistic prose, or exaggerated or 
 even faithful descriptions of their life of every
 
 THE CULTIVATION OF THE IMAGINATION 27 
 
 day. Remember what I am driving at is 
 the cultivation of the power of representing 
 things different from those amongst which we 
 live. 
 
 But all this, you will say, is scarcely educa- 
 tional. I maintain that it is. The books which 
 are read in the leisure hours are often as educa- 
 tional as those which are read in the tunes of 
 study. But I will now apply myself to the 
 studies over which this Institute has an influ- 
 ence, and I will grapple boldly with my task. 
 You will see that I have hitherto seemed to 
 jumble up fairy tales and history travels and 
 simple creations of the brain. To my mind they 
 all do a certain work in common. But when I 
 come to serious educational work, let me single 
 out history for special remark. I am an enthu- 
 siast for the study of history, and I entreat you 
 to give it as much attention as you can at this 
 place. You will see that my whole argument 
 tends to the study of history and of general 
 literature, not for the sake of facts alone, not for 
 mere knowledge, but for their influence on the 
 mind.
 
 28 THE CULTIVATION OF THE IMAGINATION 
 
 History may be dry and technical if you con- 
 fine yourself to the chronological order of facts 
 if you study only to know what actually took 
 place at certain dates. I am sure we have all 
 suffered from the infliction of skeleton histories 
 excellent tests of patience, but I am afraid as 
 little exciting to the imagination as any other 
 study in which any one can possibly engage. 
 What I am looking to is rather the colouring of 
 history the familiarity with times gone by, 
 with the characters, the passions, the thoughts 
 and aspirations of men who have gone before us. 
 History with that life and colour and many 
 historians of the present day write histories 
 which fulfil these conditions history with that 
 life and colour cultivates the imagination as 
 much and better than many of the best ro- 
 mances. When thus written, and when once 
 the reader is fairly launched into it, history is 
 as absorbing as a novel, and more amusing and 
 interesting than many a tale. I will be quite 
 candid with you. I am something of a novel 
 reader myself. The fact is, there is one differ-
 
 THE CULTIVATION OF THE IMAGINATION 29 
 
 ence between a novel and a history which is in 
 favour of the former at the first start. In a his- 
 tory the first fifty pages are often intolerably 
 dull, and it is the opening which frightens off 
 half the readers. You generally have some pre- 
 liminary description of the state of Europe, for 
 instance, or of the state of India, or the state of 
 France, or some other country, at a given time. 
 You don't come to the main point you don't 
 come to what interests you at first sight ; and 
 thus many persons are disheartened before they 
 thoroughly get into the book, and they throw 
 it aside, and characterise it as being very dull. 
 Now, in a novel, enjoyment often begins at the 
 very first page. Still, when I have taken up 
 some interesting history for instance, lately I 
 have been reading Kaye's ' History of the Sepoy 
 War' and when I have got over the first few 
 introductory pages, which are a little heavy, I 
 ask myself, How is it possible that a man of 
 sense can spend his time on reading novels 
 when there are histories of this absorbing in- 
 terest, which are so vastly more entertaining,
 
 30 THE CULTIVATION OF THE IMAGINATION 
 
 so vastly more instructive, and so much better 
 for the mind than any novel ? Believe me, an 
 intelligent and a systematic study of history 
 contains a vast resource of interest and amuse- 
 ment to all those who will embark in it. 
 
 Let me explain a little more. Histories, if 
 you only look to chronological details, you may 
 possibly find to be exceedingly like Bradshaw's 
 ' Railway Guide ' very confusing, very uninter- 
 esting in themselves, only useful sometimes in 
 enabling you to know how to go from one period 
 to another to make an historical journey. Or 
 you might compare these general surveys of 
 history of which I was speaking to a skeleton 
 map of a country of which you know very little. 
 You see the towns noted down. They are but 
 uninteresting spots on the map. They convey 
 nothing to you ; they don't interest you. But 
 if you have travelled in that country, if you 
 know the towns mentioned on the map, then you 
 pore over the map with a very different interest. 
 You feel real personal pleasure ; your mind and 
 imagination recall the country itself. So you
 
 THE CULTIVATION OF THE IMAGINATION 31 
 
 will find that the grand secret to enjoy history 
 is to get beyond the outlines, to be thoroughly 
 familiar with the particular period, to saturate 
 yourself with the facts, the events, the circum- 
 stances, and the personages which belong to a 
 certain time in history. When you have done 
 this, the men and women of that period become 
 your personal friends ; you take an intense de- 
 light in their society, and you experience a sense 
 of pleasure equivalent to what is given by any 
 novel. 
 
 I heard yesterday an anecdote of a lady who 
 had lived a great deal in political circles. She 
 had received from a friend a book about Sir 
 Thomas More. When she had read it, she wrote 
 back and thanked the sender of the book, tell- 
 ing him with what delight she had perused it, 
 and adding, ' Sir Thomas More and Erasmus are 
 particularly intimate friends of mine.' She was 
 so well acquainted with that period, that all that 
 was written about it came home to her heart 
 she knew it, she had lived in it, it had a living 
 interest for her. That is the mode and manner
 
 32 THE CULTIVATION OP THE IMAGINATION 
 
 in which I would recommend you to study his- 
 tory. 
 
 Let me be more precise. I would not gallop 
 through histories any more than I would 
 through a country if I wanted to explore it. 
 I would take a particular period, and read every 
 book bearing on that period which my library 
 supplied me, and which I had time to read. 
 Then I would read the poets who had written 
 in the same period ; I should read the dramas 
 relating to it, and thus I should saturate myself 
 with everything which was connected with it. 
 By that means I would acquire that power 
 which I value, which I want you to acquire 
 individually, and which I should like every 
 English man and woman to possess as far as 
 possible, namely, the power of being able to 
 live in other tunes and sympathise with other 
 tunes, and to sympathise with persons and 
 races different from those amongst whom we 
 move. 
 
 And do not think that in such studies you 
 lose your time. Are there fathers and mothers
 
 THE CULTIVATION OF THE IMAGINATION 33 
 
 here who hold that it is a dangerous doctrine 
 which I preach ? If so, I hope I may be able to 
 reassure them ; for I hold that in all spheres and 
 all classes, culture of this kind is of the highest 
 value, and that it does not disqualify, but the 
 reverse, for business life. Amongst the wealthier 
 classes of business men, I rejoice to think that 
 prejudice against culture as being dangerous to 
 business is rapidly dying out, and that a Uni- 
 versity education is no longer regarded with 
 suspicion. ' What do men learn at Oxford and 
 Cambridge that will fit them for business ! ' was 
 formerly often asked ; but I do not think this 
 question is put quite so often now. I will tell 
 you what once occurred to myself in regard to 
 this point. Some eight years ago I heard a dis- 
 tinguished modern poet ask, ' What becomes of 
 all the Senior Wranglers and of all the Oxford 
 First Class men ? One does not hear of them 
 in after life.' I ventured very modestly to reply 
 that, not being a Cambridge man, I could not 
 speak on behalf of Cambridge men ; but as to 
 Oxford I was able to inform him that eight of 
 
 c
 
 34 THE CULTIVATION OF THE IMAGINATION 
 
 her First Class men were at that moment in 
 Her Majesty's Cabinet. 
 
 But you may say, * This is all very well for 
 the greater affairs of life, but as regards the 
 general rough-and-tumble of business life, why 
 should you have this cultivation? Is it not 
 dangerous, and does it not rather hamper a 
 young man when he goes into business life ? ' 
 Let me give you another illustration, and you 
 will forgive me if it is somewhat of a personal 
 character. It may come home to some of my 
 younger listeners more forcibly than the most 
 eloquent generalisation. My own father came 
 over to England as a very young man, with one 
 friend little older than himself, and with very 
 little more money in his pocket than a great 
 many of the students here, I dare say, possess. 
 He has told me, half in joke and half in earnest, 
 that he was obliged to found a firm because he 
 wrote such a bad hand that no one would take 
 him for a clerk. But he was steeped to the lips 
 in intellectual culture. In his father's house, as 
 a boy he had met the great literary men of the
 
 THE CULTIVATION OF THE IMAGINATION 35 
 
 best period of German literature. He had heard 
 Schiller read his own plays. He had listened to 
 the conversation of great thinkers and great 
 poets. He was a good historian, an acute critic, 
 well versed in literature, and a fine musician to 
 boot. But did this stand in his way as a young 
 man coming over to London with a view to 
 found a business ? Has it stood in his way of 
 founding a firm of which I, as his son, am very 
 proud ? No ! On the contrary, it aided his 
 success ; and with this example before me, I 
 hope you will understand that I am able to 
 speak with affectionate conviction of the fact 
 that culture will not interfere with the due dis- 
 charge of the duties of business men in any 
 sphere of business life. 
 
 I will not add to what I have said about the 
 great increase of happiness and amusement to 
 be gained for your own leisure in after-life if 
 you follow the studies I have named. It is 
 most certainly for your happiness and advan- 
 tage ; but you may remember that I used much 
 stronger language than this. I said it was not
 
 36 THE CULTIVATION OF THE IMAGINATION 
 
 only of advantage for the young themselves, 
 but for the national advantage, that imagina- 
 tive culture should be considered as one of the 
 aims of education. I have still got to make 
 this point good. Consider what are the duties 
 of this country in which we live. Let me now 
 take you away from Liverpool away even from 
 England and ask you to look at our imperial 
 duties at our colonies, at our vast empire, at 
 our foreign relations and then I want you to 
 ask yourselves whether it is important or not 
 that Englishmen shall be able to realise to 
 themselves what is not immediately around 
 them, that they shall be able to transport 
 themselves in imagination to other countries 
 over which they rule. It is not sufficient for 
 Englishmen to think only of their own sur- 
 roundings. There was a time when the des- 
 tinies of England used to be wielded by a few 
 individual men, or by small coteries of trained 
 statesmen. India was governed for years ex- 
 ternally to the influence of public opinion. 
 But that is past. Public opinion is stepping
 
 THE CULTIVATION OF THE IMAGINATION 37 
 
 in ; and, if public opinion steps in, I wish that 
 public opinion to be properly trained. Why, 
 even ministers for foreign affairs now declare 
 that they wait the behests of the public, their 
 employers, before they take any decided step. 
 If public opinion assumes these responsibilities, 
 again I say, let us look to the formation of that 
 public opinion, and see that the young genera- 
 tion of Englishmen are trained properly for the 
 discharge of these functions. Parliament is 
 more and more sharing with the executive 
 Government of the country the duties of ad- 
 ministration, and the press and the public are 
 more and more sharing this duty with Parlia- 
 ment. Thus you will understand the import- 
 ance I attach to the training of the coming 
 generation, not only in useful knowledge, but 
 in all that they ought to know, and ought to 
 be able to feel and think, when they discharge 
 imperial duties. 
 
 And, I ask, by what power can this result be 
 better obtained than by the intelligent study 
 of history and of modes of thought which lie
 
 38 THE CULTIVATION OF THE IMAGINATION 
 
 beyond our own immediate range ? It is no 
 easy thing for democracies to rule wisely and 
 satisfactorily self-governing colonies or subject 
 races. Imagination, in its highest and broadest 
 sense, is necessary for the noble discharge of 
 imperial duties. The governing classes and 
 we are all governing classes now should be 
 able to ' represent to themselves absent things ' 
 all the impulses, and sympathies, and passions 
 of other races different from themselves. To 
 ignore this condition, to be narrow-minded, 
 is a very great national danger. Narrow- 
 mindedness lost us in times past the American 
 Colonies. Statesmen were not able to sym- 
 pathise with, or throw themselves into, the 
 position of these Colonies ; they could not 
 represent to themselves absent things ; and 
 they thought that this England of ours, with 
 what they learned here, was sufficient for their 
 guidance in the discharge of their imperial duties* 
 It is not enough. We must look beyond our 
 own local surroundings. The study of history 
 will also enable you to fight the ignorance which
 
 THE CULTIVATION OF THE IMAGINATION 39 
 
 may possibly prevail in many places with regard 
 to our own past and our own colonial empire. 
 What sentiment brings down the cheers of a 
 popular audience more thoroughly than when 
 a great statesman or popular orator exclaims, 
 ' We are an historic people ' ? May I be per- 
 mitted humbly to suggest that, if we are a 
 great historic people, we may with advantage 
 study and know our own history ? May I ask 
 that, if we are an historic people, we may take 
 advantage of our history as a lesson for the 
 future ? and that, if we are an imperial people, 
 we may study and lay to heart and master the 
 conditions of some of the races and the colonies 
 over which we rule ? I wonder how much 
 many of us know of the way in which the 
 Indian Empire was originally won and main- 
 tained ! I dare say some of you reproach me 
 in your hearts, and say, 'We know all about 
 it;' and why ? because everybody at any rate, 
 a great many people have read the Essays of 
 Lord Macaulay on Olive and Warren Hastings ; 
 but if these two essays had not been written,
 
 40 THE CULTIVATION OP THE IMAGINATION 
 
 I wonder how much would be known of the 
 history of India ? I do not do wrong, then, 
 I think, if I recommend the pupils of this 
 Institute to push the study of our own national 
 history, and to enter and throw themselves into 
 that study with patriotism and alacrity. It is 
 the duty of citizens to read and know their 
 own past. I want to stimulate a habit of 
 mind which is capable of apprehending and 
 sympathising with a state of things different 
 from that which surrounds us. 
 
 I do not know whether it is apocryphal story 
 or not that a distinguished statesman once de- 
 clared a page of the Times to be more worth 
 reading than the whole of Thucydides. If that 
 was ever said, I should reply, ' No, a thousand 
 times No/ That sentiment embodies the very- 
 tone of mind against which I am contending. 
 It suggests that it is important to give an 
 exclusive study to what is surrounding us, and 
 that we have little to do with the great past. 
 Yes, if our duty and our pleasure were to deal 
 only with matters that lie around ourselves
 
 THE CULTIVATION OF THE IMAGINATION 41 
 
 if, for instance, in Parliament, we had only to 
 pass gas and water bills, to improve tariffs, to 
 deal with the material aspects of the present, 
 and the growing resources which railroads and 
 telegraphs bestow then the hasty survey of 
 passing events which the daily journals supply 
 might be more useful to us than the history 
 of an Athenian war, even though that history 
 were written with spirit-stirring eloquence and 
 patriotism, and were full of sound political re- 
 flections which remain true throughout eternal 
 time. But if we have more to do than this, 
 if we have not only to deal with English- 
 men precisely like ourselves if British public 
 opinion and British statesmen have not only to 
 deal with Englishmen who are registered at 
 their birth by an English Registrar-General, 
 then vaccinated according to an English Act 
 of Parliament, and sent, under another English 
 Act of Parliament, through elementary schools, 
 and dealt with for the remainder of their lives 
 under English Acts of Parliament ; but if, be- 
 sides, we have to deal with subject races who
 
 42 THE CULTIVATION OF THE IMAGINATION 
 
 are more like the men described by Herodotus 
 than average London or Liverpool men, then I 
 hope you will understand how important it is 
 that we should cultivate the capacity of under- 
 standing what others think and do, and so be 
 able to lift ourselves above the ordinary range 
 of daily life. 
 
 Men who know little of our previous history, 
 and are feeble in their power to imagine that 
 is, to represent to themselves the situations and 
 views of other nations are what I consider a 
 dangerous element in the formation of public 
 opinion. Those men are still more dangerous 
 if, because they know very little, and because 
 they are somewhat local and narrow-minded, 
 they fancy themselves to be practical men. I 
 am often frightened when, upon some great 
 question, I hear a man say, 'I am going to 
 take a very business-like view of this question.' 
 It is almost as bad as when a man, upon some 
 question of propriety, says he is going to look 
 at it ' as a man of the world.' I then always 
 suspect the judgment he is going to give.
 
 THE CULTIVATION OF THE IMAGINATION 43 
 
 When a man says, ' I am going to look at a 
 great question as a business man/ it is ten to 
 one he means, ' I am not going to be gulled by 
 any of your grand generalisations ; I am not 
 going to be misled by historical parallels, or 
 seduced by any rhetorical phrases. I do not 
 wish to be told what foreign nations are think- 
 ing of, or are likely to do. I wish to judge of 
 this as a sensible man of business. I know the 
 effect such and such a line of policy will have 
 on trade and on the funds, and that is enough 
 for me.' Now, I have sometimes hoped that I 
 might have claimed myself to be a business 
 man, or a business-like man ; and most of you 
 will consider yourselves the same ; and I declare 
 that it is prostituting the name of ' business- 
 like ' to confound it, as it is often done, with a 
 narrow-minded view of imperial questions. It 
 is not business-like at all ; it is very unbusiness- 
 like. Call it by whatever name you will, whether 
 narrow-mindedness or not, I consider that to 
 judge from hand to mouth of all our great 
 questions is a very dangerous tendency a
 
 44 THE CULTIVATION OF THE IMAGINATION 
 
 tendency which is fostered by ignorance of the 
 great principles of human action, and of the 
 former teaching of the history of the world. 
 
 Again, you will think me very persistent, 
 but I say the study of history will correct 
 these tendencies, and will mitigate the influ- 
 ence of any narrow-minded judgment of passing 
 events. Some newspapers, for instance I am 
 speaking entirely hypothetically often take 
 alarm, and begin to think they ought to write 
 down the power of England. They begin to 
 minimise our power, and say, ' What can Eng- 
 land do ? Look at the size of our little island. 
 Look at the statistical lists of our ships and 
 guns, of our men and armies. What can we 
 do ? After all, we are very small in numbers.' 
 Now, I should like the public sometimes to be 
 able, when it is asked, ' What can England 
 do ? ' to check this appeal to contemporary 
 statistics by an intelligent recollection of the 
 statistics of the past. I do not say that I 
 want England to do anything, but I do not 
 want it to be laid down that England can not
 
 THE CULTIVATION OF THE IMAGINATION 45 
 
 do anything. I rebel against this tendency of 
 always writing down our own country, as if our 
 powers were insufficient. Study history as I 
 ask you, and you will be able to answer those 
 who urge objections of this kind. Study the 
 history of the past, and see what England has 
 done at times when neither her population nor 
 her wealth was such as it is at present, and you 
 will wonder when you hear it said that ' Eng- 
 land after all is a small country.' 
 
 How many of you in this room know what 
 the population of this country was in the great 
 Napoleonic times, when Great Britain took the 
 lead, and when newspapers did not point to 
 the size of the island and the smallness of the 
 population as compared with the population of 
 other countries'? Our population at the pre- 
 sent time is about 33,000,000, probably more. 
 The population of Great Britain in 1801, when 
 the census was taken, including the armies 
 serving abroad, was under 11,000,000,* and I 
 
 1 The census of Ireland was not taken in 1801, so that the total 
 population of Great Britain and Ireland at that date cannot be 
 stated.
 
 46 THE CULTIVATION OF THE IMAGINATION 
 
 ask you to remember the historical lessons 
 which that great time teaches. Remember 
 what England with that population was en- 
 abled to do, and what weight her counsels had 
 in Europe and throughout the world. To my 
 mind, the teaching of history is this, that not- 
 withstanding Krupp guns and Palliser shells; 
 notwithstanding Martini and Chassepot rifles ; 
 notwithstanding ironclads and torpedoes ; not- 
 withstanding field telegraphs and balloons ; and 
 notwithstanding that one great European Power 
 has lost her influence, and another great Power 
 has gained influence in Europe ; notwithstand- 
 ing all this, the teaching of history is, that a 
 great country of 33,000,000 of inhabitants, un- 
 surpassed in wealth, has no business to depre- 
 ciate her own power or minimise those great 
 efforts which, if need be, but only if need be 
 and if right be, she will venture to put forth. 
 
 But perhaps some of you may think that I 
 have been wasting my pains. You may think 
 that, though I have been pleading in favour of 
 the cultivation of the imagination amongst the
 
 THE CULTIVATION OF THE IMAGINATION 47 
 
 English people, the results I aim at have been 
 achieved to a very considerable extent already, 
 and that we are highly imaginative because, as 
 I admit, we are becoming a highly sentimental 
 and susceptible people. I admit that it is very 
 unfair on the part of foreigners continually to say, 
 as they do say, that Englishmen are not prepared 
 ever to make sacrifices for an idea. I consider 
 that England, especially in late generations, 
 has certainly been ready to make considerable 
 sacrifices, not only on material grounds, but on 
 moral grounds. For instance, take the abolition 
 of the Slave Trade. That was an effort which 
 England made from the sincerest and purest 
 motives of conviction and morality ; but nearly 
 all Continental writers disbelieve in the self- 
 sacrificing nature of that great measure, and 
 declare that we were guided by self-interest. 
 They are entirely deceived. When the country's 
 feelings have been touched, we have again and 
 again been willing to make considerable sacri- 
 fices, and we should again be prepared to make 
 such sacrifices in the cause of right and morality.
 
 48 THE CULTIVATION OF THE IMAGINATION 
 
 But I do not admit that susceptibility and sen- 
 timent are at all equivalent to that imaginative 
 capacity with which I have been dealing. I 
 do not at all wish to stimulate further what I 
 may call the susceptible side of English politics, 
 because I think we have gone far enough in 
 that direction. I prefer that manly and sturdy 
 national character which I see written in many 
 of the great histories I have recommended you 
 to study, and I do not consider that the 
 cultivation of the power of representing to 
 yourselves absent things, and of being able 
 to sympathise with, and to understand, the 
 necessities of our colonies and of other countries, 
 and to take generally that wider and broader 
 view that I have recommended, is at all iden- 
 tical with the development of a sentimental 
 character in politics a tendency which I, for 
 one, view with some alarm. 
 
 Well, now, I am afraid that I have taken 
 you a very long way. I began with the 
 nursery, and I have launched you in the end 
 into a very wide field indeed. I might have
 
 THE CULTIVATION OF THE IMAGINATION 49 
 
 followed up my argument by showing the 
 necessity, even for many serious domestic ques- 
 tions, of cultivating the faculty to which I have 
 alluded. I might almost venture to say that a 
 House of Commons without imagination would, 
 to my mind, be a bad House of Commons and 
 a dangerous House of Commons. A church 
 without imagination would be a church with- 
 out life and without the power of retaining its 
 hold upon its flocks. Imagination, in the sense 
 which I have described, is necessary every- 
 where, and perhaps we have too little of it now 
 in a great many departments of life ; and I will 
 tell you why. Because we are all too much 
 oppressed with detail because, in the study of 
 detail, and in the study of useful knowledge, 
 we frequently too much ignore and too much 
 forget the broader lines of study, and the more 
 important generalisations which neither states- 
 men nor electors, nor indeed any class, ought 
 ever to lose sight of. Full of this conviction, 
 I confidently ask you all to apply yourselves 
 to these higher studies, both at home, in this 
 
 D
 
 50 THE CULTIVATION OF THE IMAGINATION 
 
 Institute, in your public libraries, by every 
 available means. Once more let me say to 
 you that a livelihood is not a life, and, believe 
 me, if you devote yourselves to such studies 
 if you are able to cultivate that power which 
 I have asked you to cultivate you will find 
 that it will make you better citizens, more 
 ardent patriots, and better and happier men 
 and women.
 
 THE USE OF IMAGINATION IN STUDY 
 AND IN LIFE 1 
 
 MY first duty is to express to the Students 
 here assembled my grateful thanks for the 
 honour they have done me in electing me to a 
 post which has been filled by so many illustrious 
 men, and which brings each successive holder 
 of it into such friendly touch with this famous 
 University. Let me assure you that the heavy 
 pressure of political existence has not crushed 
 out my academic instincts, and that to meet a 
 large assembly of students, and to discourse to 
 them of matters affecting University life, is a 
 most welcome interlude in those other occupa- 
 tions, unmentionable on this occasion, in which 
 it is my fate to be engaged. The pleasure of 
 
 1 Rectorial Address delivered at Edinburgh University, Novem- 
 ber 19th, 1891. Eeprinted with alterations.
 
 52 THE USE OF IMAGINATION 
 
 meeting you will be enhanced if I should be 
 able to give a practical proof of my gratitude to 
 you by any thoughts or suggestions which 
 might help to forward the great work in which 
 this University is interested. 
 
 I see around me distinguished men to whom, 
 in each of your special branches of learning or 
 science, you look for guidance and help. I stand 
 in the midst of men who have doubtless been 
 the critics I hope the indulgent critics of 
 successive Lord Rectors, the value of whose 
 addresses on things in general they have been 
 able, by the help of their deeper knowledge of 
 things in particular, to submit to a very search- 
 ing test. The diversity of your studies increases 
 the embarrassment of a Rector, who would wish 
 to address no single school, but to find some 
 common ground of interest, some topic on which 
 he might equally claim the attention of the 
 students of the humanities, of medicine, of 
 philosophy, of science, indeed of all the faculties. 
 Clearly, he must search for that common ground, 
 not in the subject, but in the method of study ;
 
 THE USE OF IMAGINATION 53 
 
 not in the material, but in the instrument by 
 which the material must be moulded and mani- 
 pulated. 
 
 The discussion of methods of study has, I 
 confess, always inspired me with particular 
 interest. The choice of the method has often 
 appeared to me almost equal in importance 
 to the choice of the subject-matter of the study 
 itself. To one method of study I propose to 
 direct your minds to-day. 
 
 I want to bespeak your attention to the use 
 to which the faculty of imagination should be 
 put, in the pursuits in which you are engaged. 
 To another audience, on a previous occasion, I 
 have spoken of the cultivation of the imagina- 
 tion, of the sharpening of this instrument for 
 use. To-day, I will assume the existence of 
 this form of intellectual force. I will assume 
 that the imagination has been already cultivated, 
 that you all possess this precious faculty in a 
 greater or less degree, and I will ask you to 
 accompany me in an investigation of some of the 
 occasions for its actual application.
 
 54 THE USE OF IMAGINATION 
 
 At the outset of this inquiry I must define 
 what I mean, using the liberty, so often claimed, 
 of more or less choosing my own definition. I 
 need not say that I exclude the meaning which 
 is sometimes attached to the phrase ' a lively 
 imagination ; ' that is to say, a mental habit 
 which, departing from fact, expatiates on what 
 is contrary to fact, and scarcely escapes from 
 untruth. The imagination which I have in view 
 is the power of picturing absent things, of pre- 
 senting to the mind's eye visions of the past or 
 the future, of realising the mental attitude and 
 thoughts of another person or of an alien race. 
 
 This constructive imagination takes its start 
 from facts, but it supplements them and does 
 not contradict them. It is a faculty the con- 
 ceptions of which probably present truer pictures 
 than those afforded by knowledge of facts alone, 
 vivid, truthful pictures, which knowledge of 
 facts alone would not enable us to paint. It 
 is employed sometimes retrospectively, when 
 the aim proposed is to bring together and to 
 depict conditions which no longer surround us,
 
 THE USE OF IMAGINATION 55 
 
 to lead our footsteps backwards through the 
 ages; sometimes prospectively, by those who 
 would lead us forward, who would 
 
 ' Dip into the future far as human eye can see,' 
 
 and construct for us a vision of the days to come, 
 and of conditions which are not yet existent. 
 
 Perhaps I may be best able to illustrate my 
 meaning if I contrast this creative imagination, 
 this power to construct or re-construct, with 
 the faculty of analysis. The operation which I 
 have in my mind is the very opposite of 
 analysis. Analysis eliminates, separates, strips 
 off, reduces. Analysis discards temporary con- 
 ditions and surrounding circumstances, and 
 reduces what is under examination to its 
 simplest form. Analysis in Economics seeks to 
 discover the general principle by what may be 
 called the destructive process. It has, I admit, 
 a fascination of its own. 
 
 The function of constructive imagination, on 
 the other hand, is to proceed in the opposite 
 direction. Its work is, by an effort of the mind,
 
 56 THE USE OF IMAGINATION 
 
 to realise and depict what is not present to the 
 sight or palpable to the touch. Take history, 
 for example. Historical analysis will evolve 
 a general law, common to all periods, to all 
 generations of men,out of the complex conditions 
 of a given age or ages. It will strip off the 
 temporary, the accidental. Its work is elimina- 
 tion. Historical imagination, on the other hand, 
 will endeavour mentally to restore the picture 
 of a past age, of which the colours have faded 
 with time. It will not neglect details, for 
 details are a great part of life. It will endeavour 
 to restore the special character, the movement 
 and the stir, which drier annals have failed to 
 preserve. 
 
 Take, again, the sciences which deal with 
 animal life. The analytic method separates 
 nerve from muscle, bone from tendon, limb from 
 limb. It endeavours, so far as possible, to 
 examine separately the function and constitu- 
 tion of each vessel and member, of each com- 
 ponent part of the organism, and to isolate it 
 from the disturbing and sympathetic influences
 
 THE USE OF IMAGINATION 57 
 
 of other parts of the frame. Analysis may be 
 necessary before synthesis can be applied ; but 
 it is the synthetic, the imaginative method I 
 venture to call it, which by use of the materials 
 accumulated by analysis and observation, en- 
 abled Charles Darwin to undertake that mighty 
 reconstructive effort which embraces the past, 
 the present, and the future, of animal life upon 
 our globe. 
 
 Deficient imagination is often found in the 
 moral world. Often you find in men an absolute 
 incapacity to realise an unfamiliar situation, to 
 grasp conditions which are not immediately 
 visible, to recognise facts which to others are a 
 plain and patent element in their lives. That 
 incapacity springs from a dull and uncultivated 
 imagination. Suppose this incapacity, this want 
 of power to understand the surroundings by 
 which the motives, the characters, the influences 
 of men different from ourselves are determined ; 
 suppose it to characterise intellectual studies, 
 and truth will suffer, knowledge will be impeded, 
 education blighted, and interest lost.
 
 58 THE USE OF IMAGINATION 
 
 Students may be suffering from lack of imagi- 
 nation without being conscious of their short- 
 coming themselves. They read and they 
 criticise. Theories seem preposterous to them, 
 illustrations absurd. Unable to understand 
 the spirit of a time in which they do not live, 
 or to realise conditions with which they are not 
 themselves familiar, they discard sound teaching 
 simply because they have not sufficient imagina- 
 tion to re-create in their minds the circum- 
 stances under which the theory was composed, 
 and the illustration adduced. 
 
 I shall invite you to follow me presently into 
 the field of Economics, where the want of pro- 
 spective imagination has hampered the most 
 famous writers, and the want of retrospective 
 imagination has warped the views of some of 
 the most distinguished critics. I shall ask you 
 to follow me in the application of imagination to 
 other studies. But you will, I think, be better 
 able to grasp the full import of the bearing of 
 my thesis upon your own actual intellectual 
 work, if, in the first instance, I illustrate the
 
 THE USE OF IMAGINATION 59 
 
 operation of retrospective and prospective imagi- 
 nation in the domain of literature. 
 
 Let us begin, then, by examining to what 
 extent the presence or absence of the exercise 
 of that faculty, which I have called imagination, 
 lifts or lowers the work of authors who attempt 
 to reconstruct the past. Some there are whom 
 you feel to be able to realise the conditions of 
 vanished ages, to imagine the men and women 
 of former generations, and the surroundings 
 amidst which they moved, in such a manner as 
 to convey to their readers a real and lifelike 
 picture of the very form and spirit of the time. 
 Others, who make the like attempt, seem 
 merely to have collected facts with diligence 
 and accuracy. The facts may be strung together 
 on the thread of a fictitious story, but, because 
 the life-giving breath of imagination is absent, 
 the result is a handbook of antiquities and not 
 a living picture of the past. 
 
 Have any of you read Charicles or Gallus, 
 the works of the learned Becker ? The author 
 was a man of profound research. He had
 
 60 THE USE OF IMAGINATION 
 
 studied the habits and customs of the Greeks 
 and Romans. He had wide knowledge of what 
 had been written as to their dress, their educa- 
 tion, and their laws. He was acquainted with 
 every detail of their civic and private occupa- 
 tions. And what is the result ? He produces the 
 furniture but not the life, the outline of the pic- 
 ture but not the colouring. Wanting in imagi- 
 nation, he has not the power, perhaps not even 
 the wish to reconstruct the past as a living 
 whole. He puts the dry bones together, but he 
 cannot put flesh upon them, or send the blood 
 coursing through the veins. His accumulations 
 are of great value, no doubt, but we feel as we 
 read that we are walking in the valley of dry 
 bones, and doubt, with the prophet, whether 
 these dry bones can live. 
 
 Or take a tragedy of Racine. His talent was 
 undoubtedly great. We are no longer in the 
 valley of dry bones. His heroes live and move 
 with a stately and regal grace, but they move in 
 a French atmosphere. He has imagination, but 
 not the historical, the retrospective imagination,
 
 THE USE OF IMAGINATION 61 
 
 which is necessary for the true reproduction 
 of the past. There is a French ring about 
 the valour and passion of his Greeks, and 
 Agamemnon walks with the air of the Grand 
 Monarque. Goethe's Iphigenia stands to my 
 mind on a higher level. I do not mean merely 
 that the German poet has successfully adopted 
 the outward form and method of Greek tragedy, 
 but that the eternal, the vital part of human 
 nature, that which is common to Greek and 
 German, to classical and romantic times, speaks 
 to us from his stately verse. But even here we 
 feel no confidence as we follow his narrative that 
 we are moving in a reconstructed past. 
 
 But Shakespeare ? Have we not there more 
 confidence ? Though he may be inaccurate his- 
 torically, though he may abouud in anachronisms 
 which may call a smile from superior persons, 
 do we not feel that his splendid imagination has 
 recalled to us real men and women of a long 
 past generation, and breathed into them the 
 spirit of a time in which they lived ? Caesar and 
 Anthony may dress like Elizabethans, but in
 
 62 THE USE OF IMAGINATION 
 
 essentials they are true Romans. To me, I con 
 fess, the reproduction of the spirit of the past, 
 of the colouring, the flesh and blood of older 
 generations, has a peculiar fascination, and a 
 higher interest even than absolute historical 
 accuracy as to facts. Here I may be treading 
 on delicate ground. Is not absolute accuracy 
 the first duty of the historian ? Should not the 
 exposure of myths, the destruction of false stories, 
 which have been handed down to us, have the 
 first claim on our literary gratitude ? Alas ! 
 that I should confess it, not on mine. 
 
 Give me a historian who, with the faculty of 
 realising conditions which have passed away, 
 can paint us a general picture of a period which 
 we wish to recall. Give me a historian who can 
 make us feel as if the men and women of ancient 
 times were moving in bodily shape before our 
 eyes, surrounded by the circumstances of their 
 own day, obedient to the standard of feeling and 
 duty under which they were brought up, not 
 speaking the language of to-day, not influenced 
 by motives which were foreign to their time,
 
 THE USE OF IMAGINATION 63 
 
 and I shall feel that he is educating me more 
 thoroughly in the science of history than if he 
 had furnished any amount of tabulated informa- 
 tion, any record of simple transactions, any 
 acute analysis of individual characters. For my 
 own part, true to this possibly heterodox creed, 
 I love historical novels composed by a master 
 hand, and I believe that a great multitude of 
 readers sin in common with me. 
 
 I believe that a large number of Scotchmen, 
 ay ! and of Englishmen, have gained more real 
 insight into the history of their country by the 
 aid of a joyful course of Walter Scott, than by 
 the stiffer study of learned historians, who lack 
 the imagination without which, in my humble 
 opinion, history cannot properly be written. I 
 will not go so far as to say, before an audience 
 of which erudite professors may form a part, 
 that I have learnt as much of French history 
 from Alexandre Dumas as I have from pro- 
 fessional historians, but I shall not very deeply 
 resent the charge if it should be brought 
 against me.
 
 64 THE USE OF IMAGINATION 
 
 I have tried to convey to you what I mean 
 by constructive imagination, and I have dealt 
 with it thus far from the retrospective point of 
 view, from the point of view of the efforts of 
 authors to paint us pictures of the past. But 
 other writers have undertaken a bolder task. 
 From classical times downwards to the latest 
 development of English and American romance, 
 from Plato the philosopher, to William Morris 
 in our own day, social reformers with literary 
 powers and imaginative minds, have aspired to 
 frame ideal states, ideal societies, and have 
 employed their constructive faculty in the 
 description of conditions removed from the 
 ordinary experience of the times in which they 
 lived, and of the ages of which history holds 
 record. I will not speak now of the prophetic 
 rhapsodies of poets, from the inspired visions of 
 the Hebrew prophet, from Virgil 
 
 ' Chanter of the Pollio glorying 
 
 in the blissful years again to be, 
 
 Summers of the snakeless meadow, 
 
 nnlaborious earth and oarless sea ' 
 
 to Tennyson, singer of the ' Golden Year,' and
 
 THE USE OF IMAGINATION 65 
 
 of the dream of progress in ' Locksley Hall.' I 
 would invite your attention for the moment to 
 the particular branch of literature which is 
 devoted to the construction of Utopias, the 
 examination of which has much attraction for 
 me. The various accounts of Utopian com- 
 munities, apart from their philosophic, their 
 literary, their political interest, offer excellent 
 materials for the study of various forms of 
 imaginative labour. In no department of 
 science or literature can we analyse with more 
 advantage the various uses to which creative 
 imagination may be put. 
 
 With the celebrated Utopias of the past 
 many of you are familiar. Plato, Sir Thomas 
 More, Bacon, Harrington, have all exercised 
 their imaginations in the creation of an ideal 
 Republic, an Utopia, an Atlantis, or an Oceana, 
 The creators of these older Utopias laid their 
 fanciful communities in contemporary but dis- 
 tant islands, or imagined them as having existed 
 in their own country thousands of years ago. 
 They described the ideals which existed in their 
 
 E
 
 66 THE USE OF IMAGINATION 
 
 own minds, rather than their hopes of what, by 
 revolutionary changes, existing societies might 
 ultimately become. 
 
 On the other hand, the latest specimens of 
 this kind of literature deal with the future. 
 The polities they create are laid a century or 
 two hence. They are prophetical, they are 
 evolutionary and revolutionary. 
 
 The prophetic romance is indeed becoming a 
 feature of the literature of to-day, but we must 
 note that as a rule it is also propagandist 
 romance. Imagination is pressed into the ser- 
 vice of a zealous apostle of a particular creed. 
 The creed may sometimes have but one article, 
 the prophecy may be penned in illustration of a 
 particular theory or to bring home some special 
 professional point. Such was the case with the 
 ' Battle of Dorking/ a fine specimen of a fore- 
 cast in which all the conditions of an imaginary 
 war were graphically and realistically worked 
 out. The writer of that clever sketch has had 
 many followers, and the prophetic brochure has 
 become a recognised weapon in the armoury of
 
 THE USE OF IMAGINATION 67 
 
 the military, the naval, the sanitary, the muni- 
 cipal reformer. 
 
 These are efforts of imagination, but they 
 cover but a limited area of thought. The con- 
 ditions which are brought to notice do not 
 involve any violent hypothesis. Different from 
 them are the Socialist novels, which assume the 
 entire subversion of existing institutions, and 
 portray conditions resulting from the establish- 
 ment of Society on what we should call a 
 Utopian basis, though they are distinguished in 
 many respects from the Utopia of More. Con- 
 structive imagination has certainly been called 
 into play in their production ; but, in most 
 cases with which I am familiar, it has been a 
 limited imagination, imagination harnessed to a 
 theory and directed to work out particular 
 results, not ordered to realise the natural effects 
 which certain causes are likely to bring about 
 when all conditions of the problem are taken 
 into account. The premise of the Socialist 
 Utopian writer is that all the evil passions by 
 which human nature is now marred, all sin and
 
 68 THE USE OF IMAGINATION 
 
 crime, all misery and unhappiness, are due to 
 our existing institutions ; and that if these 
 institutions were swept away, and replaced by 
 an ideal arrangement, under which the com- 
 mercial system, the manufacturing system, the 
 competitive system, with all their horrible 
 accompaniments of money and exchange, buy- 
 ing and selling, would no longer find a place, 
 every man and woman would be sublimely 
 happy, incomparably beautiful, iniperturbably 
 virtuous, unutterably calm. Every human 
 infirmity would disappear with the disappear- 
 ance of money. There is but one exception 
 one rift within the lute. William Morris admits 
 that so long as the passion of love remains, 
 the passion of jealousy would also survive. 
 
 I have compared Morris's fanciful picture in 
 ' News from Nowhere ' with the American 
 Bellamy's ' Looking Backward.' There is much 
 that is common to both of them. The leading 
 idea of both is a Society where buying and 
 selling have ceased, where goods are held in 
 common, where there is no individual property
 
 THE USE OF IMAGINATION 69 
 
 and no money, and therefore no necessity for 
 law, and no temptation to crime. In both, the 
 underlying theory appears to be that it is the 
 existence of our perverted social arrangements 
 which has made men and women what they are. 
 But in the constructive part of their work you 
 find a fundamental difference. Bellamy paints 
 a Society where the common stock of goods 
 is replenished by carefully regulated labour, 
 and distributed among the individual workers 
 according to a minute and elaborate system, 
 under which tickets and orders on State Stores 
 take the whole place of individual possession. 
 Every man, woman, and child is a part of a most 
 complicated system, with a distinct place and 
 function of their own. His Society represents 
 the organisation of labour and distribution in 
 the most complete form imaginable. 
 
 Morris's system, on the other hand, is sim- 
 plicity itself, for there is no organisation at all. 
 Production and consumption, collection and 
 distribution, labour and the enjoyment of the 
 fruits of labour are to be left to adjust them-
 
 70 THE USE OF IMAGINATION 
 
 selves; and the author has an enviable con- 
 fidence in their power to do so successfully. 
 He assumes that production, free from all the 
 disturbing elements of competition, free from 
 the necessity of manufacturing articles which 
 people do not really want, free from the draw- 
 backs attending private enterprise and active 
 commerce, will easily overtake consumption, 
 and that thus supplies will be so abundant that 
 everybody may have their fill without stint, 
 and no human wants remain unsatisfied. Every 
 one will love labour when he can choose freely 
 the work which he likes, and when he is no 
 longer compelled to work at all. The only fear 
 which the writer feels is not that there would 
 be a difficulty in providing food, clothing, 
 houses, and adornments for the citizens of the 
 rural paradise into which manufacturing Eng- 
 land has been converted, but that all their 
 wants would be so easily and abundantly sup- 
 plied that there might be a deficiency of work 
 for them to do, a deficiency of tasks to satisfy 
 their keen appetite for labour.
 
 THE USE OF IMAGINATION 71 
 
 Though these works of fiction are in one 
 sense clearly imaginative, it seems to me that 
 these descriptions of the men and women, who 
 gracefully people the re-organised world, are 
 nevertheless lacking in imagination. The con- 
 structive faculty has been architectural, not 
 pictorial. The men and women are nearly all 
 alike, alike among themselves, alike in the dif- 
 ferent books. Naturally alike, the authors may 
 say, because the endless diversity of existing 
 types is due to the artificial disturbances of our 
 form of civilisation. And yet would a true 
 conception of the future of human beings repre- 
 sent every member of human society as 
 temperate, calm, passionless, industrious, and 
 intelligent 1 ? Bellamy's Bostonians of the year 
 2000, are exactly like Morris's Arcadian villagers 
 of the twenty-first century. Human nature is 
 suppressed in both. Or is it I who am wanting 
 in imagination? Is it I who, saturated with 
 nineteenth-century notions, am unable to con- 
 struct in my mind the natural results of a 
 revolution in our existing social organism? I
 
 72 THE USE OF IMAGINATION 
 
 think not. These novelists have eliminated, 
 discarded, dropped too much. But then they 
 write with a purpose. 
 
 I trust that none of my academic hearers 
 have mentally quarrelled with me because I 
 have lingered in the realms of poetry and 
 fiction. Those who have followed me closely, 
 and perhaps here and there have read between 
 the lines, will have anticipated how I should 
 apply the operations of constructive imagina- 
 tion, as illustrated in Utopian fiction, to the 
 sterner studies which are at present the business 
 of your lives. The transition from such fantastic 
 novels, from dreaming poets and speculative 
 visions, to the hard problems of political eco- 
 nomy, is easy and natural. At first sight, as 
 you pore over the pages of Adam Smith, or 
 John Stuart Mill, you may possibly think that 
 you may let imagination lie dormant for a 
 season. On the contrary, there is no branch of 
 study where I would wish you to invoke it with 
 more zeal. The want of imagination in writers 
 and critics has, as I ventured to hint before,
 
 THE USE OF IMAGINATION 73 
 
 often led to profound misunderstandings. The 
 present generation open such, a book as Adam 
 Smith's ' Wealth of Nations.' They are startled 
 at some of the doctrines ; more startled by the 
 illustrations. They assume, accordingly, a criti- 
 cal attitude. They cannot believe that wisdom 
 and truth can exist in such surroundings. Call 
 imagination to your aid. Endeavour to realise 
 the conditions of the time in which the author 
 lived. Study his theories, with a full under- 
 standing of the history of those days, and you 
 will still be charmed and edified by almost every 
 page of his great work. 
 
 And while you use your imagination in read- 
 ing his writings, note the imaginative power, 
 the wonderful imaginative power, which he 
 himself exhibits. I once had the advantage of 
 hearing a very able critic deliver an address on 
 the ' Wealth of Nations/ ' I do not mean to 
 say,' he declared, ' that Adam Smith had not a 
 great command and a very great knowledge of 
 history, of law, of philosophy, and of almost 
 everything that can make an accomplished
 
 74 THE USE OF IMAGINATION 
 
 writer ; but he had, in addition to these, this 
 peculiar quality the sagacity to enter into the 
 minds of mankind ; and in dealing with the 
 subjects with which he dealt, he had the faculty 
 of anticipating and foreseeing what they would 
 do under certain circumstances. This gave him 
 the power of raising Political Economy to the 
 dignity of a deductive science.' Lord Sher- 
 brooke, Robert Lowe as he was then, in those 
 words described the special quality of prospec- 
 tive imagination. He proceeded : ' No doubt 
 the attempt was made and a noble attempt it 
 was by Mr. Bentham, Mr. Mill, and others to 
 raise politics to a like eminence. They thought 
 they could foresee what particular persons, or a 
 particular class, would do under certain political 
 conjunctures, and they attempted to raise a 
 demonstrative and deductive science of politics, 
 as Smith did a science of political economy; 
 but I am bound to say that, as far as my own 
 opinion goes, that effort, meritorious and great 
 as it was, has failed, and the science of politics 
 has still to be written.' Possibly other autho-
 
 THE USE OF IMAGINATION 75 
 
 rities may think that some of Adam Smith's 
 predictions on political economy have shared the 
 fate which Mr. Lowe assigned to those of Mill 
 on politics ; but Mr. Lowe insisted on his point 
 over and over again ; ' The test of science is pre- 
 vision or prediction, and Adam Smith appears 
 to me in the main to satisfy that condition.' ' I 
 think that Adam Smith is entitled to the unique 
 merit among all men who ever lived in this world 
 of having founded a deductive and demonstrative 
 science of human actions and conduct.' 
 
 Yet what was one of the main bases on which 
 Adam Smith's predictions were founded ? that 
 every man would act according to his own 
 interest as he understands it. This was treated 
 by Mr. Lowe as an assumption which experience 
 had shown to be universally true : the discovery 
 of this law he looked on as ' unique in mental 
 science, and entitling Adam Smith to the very- 
 highest rank among those who have cultivated 
 the more abstruse parts of knowledge/ Mr. 
 Lowe could not imagine that this very law 
 would, by many men, be held to be shaken to
 
 76 THE USE OF IMAGINATION 
 
 its very foundations in these later days ; men 
 who would not admit with him ' that the prin- 
 ciple and rules he had laid down have served for 
 the guidance of mankind from Smith's time to 
 the present, and will last as long as mankind 
 shall seek after truth, or busy themselves with 
 any intellectual study whatever.' 
 
 Mill took a different view of the ' Wealth of 
 Nations.' He praises Smith for what he calls 
 his most characteristic quality, namely, that he 
 invariably associates principles with their appli- 
 cations. But he proceeds to say that the 
 * Wealth of Nations ' is in many parts obsolete, 
 and in all imperfect. Mill explains that he him- 
 self is undertaking a work similar in its object 
 and general conception to that of Adam Smith, 
 but adapted to the more extended knowledge 
 and improved ideas of the present age. 
 
 ' No attempt,' he considered, ' had been made, 
 since Adam Smith wrote, to combine his prac- 
 tical mode of treating his subject with the in- 
 creased knowledge since acquired of its theory ; 
 or to exhibit the economical phenomena of
 
 THE USE OF IMAGINATION 77 
 
 society in the relation in which they stand to 
 the best social ideas of the present time, as he 
 did with such admirable success in reference to 
 the philosophy of his century.' 
 
 I object strongly to the use by Mill of the 
 word ' obsolete/ in relation to the ' Wealth of 
 Nations.' If Adam Smith is considered obso- 
 lete, who knows whether Mill's great work itself 
 may not before long be considered obsolete too ? 
 Indeed, I have heard it whispered that that 
 heresy has already been hateihed. Yes, that 
 work would be obsolete to those who lack the 
 faculty which I am urging you to bring to bear 
 on all your studies. To those who make no 
 attempt to reconstruct the past, to those to 
 whom present conditions alone seem plausible, 
 who cannot imagine how any other order of 
 things can have existed before, or be likely to 
 exist in the future, works which deal with con- 
 temporary illustrations will alone be instructive 
 and profitable. But for educational purposes, 
 surely the progressive series of attempts to 
 explain theories and principles by the pheno-
 
 78 THE USE OF IMAGINATION 
 
 mena of successive generations, is of more value 
 than the study of such principles judged and 
 tested by the phenomena of our own day alone. 
 Your task in your studies is to re-vivify the 
 apparently obsolete, and to realise to yourselves, 
 if you can, the illustrations which are taken 
 from a different age. A young economist has 
 well expressed the system of investigation which 
 accords with my contention that economic theo- 
 ries must be judged and studied in relation to 
 the times when they were evolved. Mr. Ashley 
 says in his preface to ' Economic History ' : 
 
 ' 1. Political Economy is not a body of abso- 
 lutely true doctrines, revealed to the world at 
 the end of the last and the beginning of the 
 present century, but a number of more or less 
 valuable theories and generalisations. 
 
 * 2. Just as the history of Society, in spite of 
 apparent retrogressions, reveals an ordinary 
 development ; so there has been an orderly 
 development in the history of what men have 
 thought, and therefore in what they have 
 thought concerning the economic side of life.
 
 THE USE OF IMAGINATION 79 
 
 ' 3. As modern economists have taken for 
 their assumptions conditions which only in mod- 
 ern times have begun to exist ; so earlier econo- 
 mic theories were based, consciously or uncon- 
 sciously, on conditions then present. Hence the 
 theories of the past must be judged in relation 
 to the facts of the past and not in relation to 
 those of the present. 
 
 ' 4. Modern economic theories are not univer- 
 sally true. They are true neither for the past, 
 when the conditions they postulate did not exist, 
 nor for the future when, unless Society becomes 
 stationary, the conditions will have changed.' 
 
 Mill calls the ' Wealth of Nations ' obsolete. 
 I had forgotten it ; but curiously enough it was 
 while taking a holiday turn at Mill that the idea 
 struck me how interesting a topic would be found 
 in an examination of old theories tested by new 
 conditions. The world moves fast ; and much 
 has happened since Mill wrote which, to a dull 
 understanding, might impair the value of some of 
 his generalisations, and of many of his illustra- 
 tions. His own imagination is often admirable.
 
 80 THE USE OF IMAGINATION 
 
 His power of realising other conditions than 
 those under which he wrote seems to me most 
 striking. But, nevertheless, the student of to- 
 day will find much that in his haste he might 
 think obsolete. Who could foresee forty years 
 ago the attitude of our Australian Colonies 
 on such a question as emigration ? Economists 
 had in their minds the necessary welcome which 
 young communities would give to the spare labour 
 of the older hemisphere. The unwillingness of 
 the working- classes in the Antipodes to allow 
 the introduction of competing hands, seems now 
 a matter of course. And, here in the old world, 
 such has been the revulsion of feeling on ques- 
 tions of labour, such have been the changes in 
 public opinion as to fundamental points in our 
 social organism, that the student of to-day, 
 brought up in a new atmosphere and fed on new 
 principles, will open his eyes with wonder at 
 what writers of an earlier period described as 
 absolute unvarying laws. The assertion of altru- 
 ism, as an equally existent force with egoism, 
 casts so changed a light over the study of
 
 THE USE OF IMAGINATION 81 
 
 Economics, that before long a sustained effort 
 of reconstructive imagination may become re- 
 quisite before the key to past writings will be 
 found. 
 
 I have shown you the capital necessity for 
 the use of imagination in a science certainly not 
 classified habitually as imaginative. Let me now 
 examine the need for its presence in another 
 region where you would least expect to find it ; 
 I mean, in the sphere of the exact sciences. I 
 must leave any detailed development of this 
 part of my subject to those whose special studies 
 qualify them to speak with authority upon it, 
 but I hope that men of science and mathemati- 
 cians will forgive me if I trespass for a moment 
 upon their domain. Mathematics may seem at 
 first sight to deal entirely with fact fact of the 
 barest and least imaginative kind. What place 
 has imagination, my hearers may say, in the 
 multiplication table, or in a proposition of 
 Euclid ? I would reply, that the whole study of 
 geometry is an imaginative study. The lines 
 with which geometry deals are not the imperfect 
 
 F
 
 82 THE USE OF IMAGINATION 
 
 lines which are drawn upon the paper or slate, 
 but the ideal lines which have length without 
 breadth, and which, therefore, can exist only in 
 the imagination. No man has ever seen or ever 
 will see a circle or a square which complies with 
 the definition of a circle or a square. The thing 
 defined exists only in the imagination, and 
 every proposition in geometry involves the 
 exercise of that faculty. 
 
 This use of the imaginative faculty is so much 
 a part of our normal habits of thought, that we 
 scarcely realise that our imagination is at work 
 at all. But with some of the higher forms of 
 mathematics it is far otherwise. You may re- 
 member that a few years ago Professor Cayley, 
 as President of the British Association, revealed 
 to the world, so far as the world was capable of 
 understanding them, some of the mysteries of 
 space. I admit that my own imagination is 
 bounded by the three Dimensions of space in 
 which we live and move, and which fashion the 
 mental conceptions of most of us. I have, there- 
 fore, the greater admiration for the effort of
 
 THE USE OF IMAGINATION 83 
 
 mind which enables mathematicians, such as 
 Professor Cayley, to transcend those conditions, 
 and to form an imaginative conception of space 
 of 4 or 5 or n dimensions, and for the science 
 which enables them to ascertain, with absolute 
 precision, the laws and conditions which would 
 prevail in an imaginary universe. 
 
 In those abstruse branches, too, of mathemati- 
 cal or physical science which deal with the pro- 
 blems of the ultimate constitution of matter, 
 and of the nature and modus operandi of the 
 forces which act upon it, it will hardly be denied 
 that imagination is a powerful and even a neces- 
 sary implement. When I think of your fellow- 
 countryman, Sir William Thomson, engaged on 
 atoms and molecules, piercing the secrets of the 
 smallest entities, brooding over the mystic 
 dance of ethereal vortices, while his magic wand 
 summons elemental forces to reveal the nature 
 of their powers to his scientific gaze, I forget 
 the disciplined accuracy of the man of science, 
 while lost in wonder at the imaginative inspira- 
 tion of the poet.
 
 84 THE USE OF IMAGINATION 
 
 Few of you can hope to reach such eminence 
 as his. Few, perhaps, can expect even to move 
 upon the same plane of scientific inquiry. But 
 in all physical research, I am convinced that no 
 powerful instrument, no lens, no microscope is 
 more essential to your equipment than a true 
 imaginative mind. 
 
 For the connexion between poetry and 
 science I have the high authority of a great 
 poet. Tennyson deeply felt the imaginative 
 grandeur of science. Let him speak himself : 
 
 What be those two shapes high over the sacred fountain, 
 Taller than all the Muses, and huger than all the mountain ? 
 
 * -3C- * * 
 
 These are Astronomy and Geology, terrible Muses ! 
 
 Muses ! yes. Not music alone, nor poetry, nor 
 simply creative art, but the colossal forms of 
 Astronomy and Geology are ranged by the side 
 of the graceful goddesses, and dwell on the 
 height of Parnassus beside the sacred fountain 
 of imaginative inspiration. 
 
 What shall I say of other sciences ? If I 
 were to speak of them at length, I should pass
 
 THE USE OF IMAGINATION 85 
 
 the limits of your patience ; but few of them 
 would be found able to dispense with imagina- 
 tion. I have spoken metaphorically of imagina- 
 tion clothing the skeleton of the past with flesh 
 and blood ; but the Palaeontologist does more 
 than this, not in metaphor, but in reality. It 
 is his task, not from a whole skeleton, but, it 
 may be, from a single bone, to re-create in 
 imagination the extinct animal of myriads of 
 years ago, and to tell us of his form and gait, 
 of his habits and manner of life. 
 
 But it is not in your studies alone that I 
 urge upon you the exercise of this illuminating 
 and stimulating faculty. When you go forth 
 into the world, armed with the intellectual 
 instruments which you have forged and sharpened 
 during your University career, with your minds 
 stored with acquired knowledge, and equipped 
 with all the capacities for future accumulation, 
 do not think that you can afford to discontinue 
 its use. Its vigorous employment will check 
 that intolerance which sometimes springs from 
 the premature dogmatism of confident youth,
 
 86 THE USE OF IMAGINATION 
 
 sometimes from the fanaticism of its too 
 enthusiastic beliefs. Intolerance and fanaticism 
 can more satisfactorily be restrained by that 
 wholesome imagination which vividly realises 
 the thoughts and feelings of other men, than 
 by that infusion of scepticism, which is one of 
 the most pernicious drugs of the age. Let 
 intolerance, which is the child of absolute 
 personal conviction, be not simply checked by 
 undermining that conviction through the nega- 
 tion of the existence of positive truth, but let 
 it be softened by the habit of studying and 
 realising to ourselves the counter-theories of 
 men who think differently from us. 
 
 Again, there is something worse than intoler- 
 ance, cruelty. Conduct which assumes various 
 forms of cruelty may be due not simply to innate 
 perversity or to a corrupt nature, but to an utter 
 incapacity to understand feelings or conditions 
 which are different from our own. The 
 antidote is such a resolute effort of constructive 
 imagination, as will vividly realise the effect of 
 pain on organisations perhaps more delicate than
 
 THE USE OF IMAGINATION 87 
 
 those of which we have experience. Imagina- 
 tion which enters into the feelings of others 
 will increase the happiness of social life, will 
 prevent a thousand asperities, will surround 
 its possessor with that sympathy which he 
 himself will exhale. 
 
 You are going forth to various vocations, 
 bearing with you varying ambitions and divers 
 sorts of gifts. Some will become ministers of 
 the Church, others physicians, others lawyers, 
 others professors, teachers, authors, investigators 
 all of you citizens and men. Apply, I entreat 
 you, the general purport of what I have said 
 each to your individual case. Future ministers 
 of religion, what will the use of imagination be 
 to you ? It will be the secret of your power 
 over others, the spell by which you will win 
 your way into the hearts of your flock. What 
 will it avail you to thunder words from the 
 pulpit which will strike the minds of your 
 hearers, only to rebound from them, and will 
 fail to gain an entrance through those intricate 
 channels which a sympathetic imagination alone
 
 88 THE USE OF IMAGINATION 
 
 can map out for your guidance ? To you, above 
 all, the power of realising the thoughts and 
 feelings of others is the highest gift you can 
 possess, the best faculty you can cultivate. 
 
 Doubtless many among you look forward to 
 a scholastic career. You will become school- 
 masters, professors, teachers of various branches 
 of knowledge to various classes. If, in entering 
 upon your duties, you do not vigorously apply 
 your imaginative faculties, you will be no 
 better than mere machines, pouring out know- 
 ledge but not pouring it in. How much talent, 
 how much research, how much splendid work 
 has been wasted, because it is carelessly poured 
 over the side of the vessel which it was intended 
 to fill ? No depth of learning, no fluency of 
 speech will rescue the teacher from much barren 
 work, if he lacks the capacity to place himself 
 in touch with those whom he desires to instruct. 
 And how can that magic bond be established 
 except by the power to understand and feel 
 that to which imagination must be our guide ? Do 
 you think that experience will act as a substi- 
 tute ? Scarcely ; though doubtless it renders
 
 THE USE OF IMAGINATION 89 
 
 invaluable help. But so infinite are the diversi- 
 ties of the human organism, that the necessity 
 for sympathetic insight can never be replaced. 
 That is the one side, but do not forget the other. 
 You must not only have this sympathetic in- 
 sight yourselves, but you must aim at rousing 
 the imaginations of your pupils ; and that, not 
 only because, as I have endeavoured to show 
 to-day, it is a faculty which will be of the 
 highest value to them in study and in life, but 
 also because it is through the imagination of the 
 pupil that you may bring interest and fascina- 
 tion into the weary round of tasks. How 
 infinitely dull is geography as a study of names 
 and numbers and outlines ; how thrilling when 
 on the wings of imagination the learner is 
 transported to the splendour and gloom of 
 tropical forests, or to the palms and temples of 
 the South ! But I resist the temptation to 
 expand this topic, lest I should be led to stray 
 from my theme of to-day, which is the uses to 
 which imagination may be put, into the kindred 
 theme of its cultivation, the subject of a former 
 address.
 
 90 THE USE OF IMAGINATION 
 
 I need not follow out the application of my 
 theories to all the professions which you are 
 likely to enter. I must leave something to 
 your imaginations. Let me simply declare 
 that I cannot conceive the vocation, however 
 simple, however humdrum, however tied down 
 to the dullest prose of life, which does not afford 
 ample scope for the exercise of that bright 
 faculty, on the virtues of which I hope that you 
 will not think that I have dilated with undue 
 enthusiasm. Still, I cannot part from my sub- 
 ject, or from you, without having said some- 
 thing on its special use to every one of you as 
 citizens and men. In these days none of you 
 can escape from some responsibility in helping 
 to shape the destinies of your country, and in 
 influencing that current of changes in our social 
 system which is sweeping along with a quick- 
 ening course. Large issues of state policy or of 
 social economy will, soon after the student is 
 metamorphosed into the voter, be submitted to 
 you in the discharge of your duties as citizens. 
 On these questions above all exercise your 
 faculty of transporting yourselves mentally to
 
 THE USE OF IMAGINATION 91 
 
 the point of view of your opponents ; on these 
 questions above all bring a trained prospective 
 imagination to bear. In the conflicts of classes, 
 in the struggles of parties, the habit and the 
 power of realising the standpoint of both sides 
 is scarcely less important for the success of any 
 cause of which you may be the champions, than 
 the firm belief in the truth of your own convic- 
 tions. 
 
 And, with regard to questions of State, let 
 your minds not "concentrate themselves too 
 much on the circumstances of the moment. 
 Carry them forward to the future. Endeavour 
 mentally to realise the conditions under which 
 the changes submitted to your judgment will 
 have to work themselves out. I admit the 
 extreme complexity of the task. Who can 
 foresee with any degree of regulated accuracy 
 the play even of the simpler forces of Nature 
 under the slightest change of conditions ? The 
 slaughter of insignificant animals, a check to 
 the activity of the tiniest carriers of Nature's 
 fertilising dusts, may have a far-reaching effect 
 on the produce of vast areas of cultivated soil.
 
 92 THE USE OF IMAGINATION 
 
 Do you remember an instance of a very curious 
 character which was adduced by Darwin ? The 
 fertilisation of plants can in some cases only 
 be effected by a particular species of insect. 
 Bumble-bees are necessary in order to enable 
 red clover to produce seed. Field-mice are the 
 foes of bumble-bees, and destroy their nests 
 underneath the ground. Cats are the enemies 
 of field-mice, and thus, if cats should be deci- 
 mated, either in consequence of penal taxation, 
 often pressed upon the Chancellor of the Ex- 
 chequer, or by any other scourge, there would 
 be such an increase in the number of field-mice 
 that bumble-bees would be exterminated, and 
 fields of clover would lie in barren hopelessness, 
 unable to produce a future crop. Or, again, are 
 you acquainted with the result of the well- 
 meant but ill-considered introduction of the 
 rabbit to our Australian Colonies ? The gift 
 became a curse under the changed conditions 
 of animal and vegetable and human life at the 
 Antipodes, and no parallel to a Hares and 
 Rabbits Bill would serve to keep down the 
 terrible pest. So again, in the vegetable world,
 
 THE USE OF IMAGINATION 93 
 
 the consequences of a single act can often not 
 be gauged except Vy imaginative foresight. 
 The man who carried watercresses to New Zea- 
 land had not read ' Jack and the Bean-stalk.' 
 Wallace tells us how this humble and tasty 
 weed, transplanted to its new home, sheds its 
 appetising qualities, and, growing with rampant 
 vigour under changed conditions of climate and 
 soil, forms stems twelve feet long, and blocks 
 mighty rivers, 1 instead of filling the baskets of 
 the industrious hawker. And if the fates of the 
 lower animals, and of flowers and plants, with 
 their simpler organisms acting under simpler 
 laws, present such astounding and unexpected 
 changes when transferred to new conditions ; if 
 it is difficult to discern the end of the chain of 
 causation which is set in motion by some ap- 
 parently simple and self-contained change, what 
 forethought, what careful prospective imagina- 
 tion, what effort to realise future possibilities 
 
 1 Since the delivery of this address, the accuracy of Wallace's 
 description of watercresses in New Zealand has been denied, so 
 far as the ' blocking mighty rivers ' is concerned. Travellers 
 cannot discover the phenomenon, but the extraordinary rapidity 
 and luxuriance with which the plants spread are admitted.
 
 94 THE USE OF IMAGINATION 
 
 must we not summon to our aid, when we have 
 to deal with complex, incalculable, powerful 
 man man swayed by a thousand diversities of 
 motive, man whose passionate organism science 
 can scarcely classify, man who is master not 
 only of his own fate, but of numberless forces of 
 nature ! Nay, more ; if the probable action of 
 a single man under changed conditions is a 
 problem of the most complex kind, what shall 
 we say of the complexity of the problem when 
 we have to deal with men in the mass ? 
 
 Yet problems dealing with men in the mass 
 will inevitably be submitted to your judgment 
 as citizens. You will not be able to serve them 
 by the easy processes of the Utopian novelist. 
 You will not be able, like them, to eliminate 
 all human passions. Passions will not have been 
 suppressed in your time. It will not be safe 
 to rest the laws which you may be called on to 
 enact, on the assumption of supernatural and 
 unattainable goodness. Progress, we hope and 
 know there will be ; but human infirmities will 
 not have disappeared in your generation. You 
 will still be bound to remember the teachings
 
 THE USE OF IMAGINATION 95 
 
 of Nature, and to reckon with a natural, though 
 most complex, sequence of causes and effects. 
 Let us put away from our thoughts present 
 controversies, which, before the students of to- 
 day enter the polling-booth as responsible house- 
 holders, may possibly have been settled one way 
 or another. Think of questions which the future 
 may bring forth. I submit simply two or three 
 illustrations ; your own ingenuity will suggest 
 many others. Fancy a question as to trans- 
 planting the sober growth of some British 
 institution, the product of this temperate zone, 
 to some tropical clime, to some more forcing 
 soil. Remember the watercresses. Let your 
 imagination realise in time how changes in con- 
 ditions modify and falsify expected results. Or, 
 fancy problems affecting the relations of some 
 parts of the community to others. Fancy pro- 
 posals by which the extermination or the para- 
 lysis of some genus or species of the human 
 social family might be brought about. Re- 
 member the sudden barrenness of the field of 
 clover, the result of suppression of the carriers 
 of Nature's fertilising dusts.
 
 96 THE USE OF IMAGINATION 
 
 Questions of labour will be always with you, 
 however the controversies of the day may end. 
 Bear in mind the serious consequences which 
 may ensue by the wellbeing of the vast organis- 
 ation on which the prosperity of the people 
 rests, by any miscalculation of the effects re- 
 sulting from the neglect of some apparently 
 insignificant cause. On all such issues, ay, 
 and on all the problems which a governing 
 people such as ours has to solve, the faculty of 
 imaginative foresight will be your most faithful 
 guide. You will not neglect the lessons of 
 historical experience, but you will test those 
 lessons and correct them, and amplify them, by 
 the exercise of what I ask you to consider as 
 one of the most precious faculties which Provi- 
 dence has implanted in the human breast the 
 faculty of wise, sympathetic, disciplined pro- 
 spective imagination. 
 
 THE END 
 
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