Unless the image of a shoe, as you hold it in your Imagination, was
transferred distinctly to the Imagination of the other, you will look in
vain to find it translated into a material reality. So it is with
your cook. She cannot make a nice loaf of bread, or prepare a dinner
properly, by merely thinking as she works. The idea of a light loaf or
of a well-cooked dinner must be distinctly in her mind, or you will eat
with a disappointed palate.
It is needless to multiply examples here. We have but to look around us
and see them everywhere.
Works of Imagination, of course, come in for their share of opprobium
from those who, instead of striving to regenerate all the universal
characteristics of humanity, would cut off and cast from it all those
traits with which they least sympathize. In spite of their opposition,
the mountain of fiction grows higher and higher every day, and the
multitude throng its pathways to gather that food for the Imagination
that is rarely given it in other compositions. Let the moralist talk
and write against this as he may, it will be of no use, for the mass
of human minds will never take an interest in any book that does not
address itself to the Imagination. From the beginning of the world until
now, no teacher and no writer was ever popular unless he addressed
himself, in part at least, to the Imagination of the world.
When the Father of History read his nine books before the Greeks at the
Olympic Games, and the people hung hour after hour and day after day
upon his words, it was not merely because he glorified their victories
that they listened with delight, but because he told the story with such
vividness that every hearer beheld the on-goings of the tale pictured in
his own Imagination.
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