than the writers
need it in theirs, but each needs a specialized kind adapted to the
particular work which he has to do.

PRACTICAL NATURE OF IMAGINATION.--Imagination is not a process of
thought which must deal chiefly with unrealities and impossibilities,
and which has for its chief end our amusement when we have nothing
better to do than to follow its wanderings. It is, rather, a
commonplace, necessary process which illumines the way for our everyday
thinking and acting--a process without which we think and act by
haphazard chance or blind imitation. It is the process by which the
images from our past experiences are marshaled, and made to serve our
present. Imagination looks into the future and constructs our patterns
and lays our plans. It sets up our ideals and pictures us in the acts of
achieving them. It enables us to live our joys and our sorrows, our
victories and our defeats before we reach them. It looks into the past
and allows us to live with the kings and seers of old, or it goes back
to the beginning and we see things in the process of the making. It
comes into our present and plays a part in every act from the simplest
to the most complex. It is to the mental stream what the light is to the
traveler who carries it as he passes through the darkness, while it
casts its beams in all directions around him, lighting up what otherwise
would be intolerable gloom.

IMAGINATION IN THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY, LITERATURE, AND ART.--Let
us see some of the most common uses of the imagination. Suppose I
describe to you the battle of the Marne. Unless you can take the images
which my words suggest and build them into struggling, shouting,
bleeding soldiers; into forts and entanglements and breastworks; into
roaring cannon and whistling bullet and screaming shell--unless you can
take all these separate images and out of them get one great unified
complex, then my description will be to you only so many words largely
without content, and you will lack the power to comprehend the
historical event in any complete way. Unless you can read the poem, and
out of the images suggested by the words reconstruct the picture which
was in the mind of the author as he wrote "The Village Blacksmith" or
"Snowbound," the significance will have dropped out, and the throbbing
scenes of life and action become only so many dead words, like the shell
of the chrysalis after the butterfly has left its shroud. Without the
power of imaginat