agination to the useful, and claims
that they are mutually exclusive, is so widespread and so persistent,
that we shall seem to many to be expressing a paradox when we say that
if we could strike the balance of the imagination that man has spent and
made permanent in esthetic life on the one hand, and in technical and
mechanical invention on the other, the balance would be in favor of the
latter. This assertion, however, will not seem paradoxical to those who
have considered the question. Why, then, the view above mentioned? Why
are people inclined to believe that our present subject, if not entirely
foreign to the imagination, is only an impoverished form of it? I
account for it by the following reasons:

Esthetic imagination, when fully complete, is simply _fixed_, i.e.,
remains a fictitious matter recognized as such. It has a frankly
subjective, personal character, arbitrary in its choice of means. A work
of art--a poem, a novel, a drama, an opera, a picture, a statue--might
have been otherwise than it is. It is possible to modify the general
plan, to add or reduce an episode, to change an ending. The novelist who
in the course of his work changes his characters; the dramatic author
who, in deference to public sentiment, substitutes a happy _denouement_
in place of a catastrophe, furnish naive testimony of this freedom of
imagination. Moreover, artistic creation, expressing itself in words,
sounds, lines, forms, colors, is cast in a mould that allows it only a
feeble "material" reality.

The mechanical imagination is objective--it must be embodied, take on a
form that gives it a place side by side with products of nature. It is
arbitrary neither in its choice nor in its means; it is not a free
creature having its end in itself. In order to succeed, it is subjected
to rigorous physical conditions, to a determinism. It is at this cost
that it becomes a reality, and as we instinctively establish an
antithesis between the imaginary and the real, it seems that mechanical
invention is outside the realm of the imagination. Moreover, it requires
the constant intervention of calculation, of reasoning, and lastly, of a
manual operation of supreme importance. We may say without exaggerating
that the success of many mechanical creations depends on the skillful
manipulation of materials. But this last moment, because it is decisive,
should not make us forget its antecedents, especially the initial
moment, which is, for psycholog