d shelter and travel and learning are all
wrapped up in it, if only we were not too ignorant to guess, or too
idle to seek.

We talk as if the poet and painter had need of imagination, but not
the student, the doctor, the philanthropist, the business man, whereas
none of these can do work at a really human standard without
imagination that is living, penetrating, active and yet trained and
disciplined.

A recent illuminating address to a body of students pointed out that
Germany's immense industrial strides have been made possible by an
education which draws men's minds out of narrow old grooves, and helps
them to see and grasp wider possibilities. But the same speaker went
on to point out that the English worker has far more real initiative
and imagination than the German, and that in our own country we have
not even to make elaborate plans for developing these qualities, but
rather to release them in our administrators so far as to prevent
actually checking them in the children now growing up.

Imagination in business, for instance, means new possibilities, fresh
sources of supply and fresh markets to demand, economy of working and
better adjustment of work to worker, so as to have less waste of our
greatest capital, human time and power. America has taught us
something in these respects; what we must do is to take what new light
she has developed, while keeping our long-grown, well-earned skill
which she has not had the chance to make.

In research work, again, we need perpetually the synthetic and
constructive imagination if individual work is not to become narrowly
specialised and shut off from other divergent or parallel lines which
would illuminate it. The other day I was told of a great surgeon who
not only has six or seven assistants to help him in his immediate
tasks, but also, since he is too busy in the service of humanity to
have time for reading, has eight trained assistants whose business it
is to read in many languages what is being done all over the civilised
world in his own line, and keep him informed as to the development of
experience. A wonderful advance on the crystallisation of individual
method, this, and yet it needed but the imaginative projection upon
scientific work of what every business firm and every political unit
has long done.

To transfer to our own concerns a method developed elsewhere is one of
the most valuable services imagination can render. Almost all
educational reform c