Happily,
however, for the human race, it possesses in the passion of hunger even,
a more immediate saviour than in the wisest selection and treatment of
its faculties. For repose is not the end of education; its end is a
noble unrest, an ever renewed awaking from the dead, a ceaseless
questioning of the past for the interpretation of the future, an urging
on of the motions of life, which had better far be accelerated into
fever, than retarded into lethargy.
By those who consider a balanced repose the end of culture, the
imagination must necessarily be regarded as the one faculty before all
others to be suppressed. "Are there not facts?" say they. "Why forsake
them for fancies? Is there not that which, may be _known_? Why forsake
it for inventions? What God hath made, into that let man inquire."
We answer: To inquire into what God has made is the main function of the
imagination. It is aroused by facts, is nourished by facts; seeks for
higher and yet higher laws in those facts; but refuses to regard science
as the sole interpreter of nature, or the laws of science as the only
region of discovery.
We must begin with a definition of the word _imagination_, or rather
some description of the faculty to which we give the name.
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