ntor undoes, decomposes, breaks up
in thought, or makes of experience a tool, an instrument, a machine, an
agency for building anew with the debris.

The practical imagination is no more foreign to inspiration than the
esthetic imagination. The history of useful inventions is full of men
who suffered privations, persecution, ruin; who fought to the bitter end
against relatives and friends--drawn by the need of creating, fascinated
not by the hope of future gain but by the idea of an imposed mission, of
a destiny they had to fulfill. What more have poets and artists done?
The fixed and irresistible idea has led more than one to a foreseen
death, as in the discovery of explosives, the first attempts at
lightning conductors, aeronautics, and many others. Thus, from a true
intuition, primitive civilizations have put on a level great poets and
great inventors, erected into divinities or demi-gods historical or
legendary personages in whom the genius of discovery is
personified:--among the Hindoos, Vicavakarma; among the Greeks,
Hephaestos, Prometheus, Triptolemus, Daedalus and Icarus. The Chinese,
despite their dry imagination, have done the same; and we find the same
condition in Egypt, Assyria, and everywhere. Moreover, the practical and
mechanical arts have passed through a first period of no-change, during
which the artisan, subjected to fixed rules and an undisputed tradition,
considers himself an instrument of divine revelation.[123] Little by
little he has emerged from that theological age, to enter the humanistic
age, when, being fully conscious of being the author of his work, he
labors freely, changes and modifies according to his own inspiration.

Mechanical and industrial imagination, like esthetic imagination, has
its preparatory period, its zenith and decline: the periods of the
precursors, of the great inventors, and of mere perfectors. At first a
venture is made, effort is wasted with small result,--the man has come
too early or lacks clear vision; then a great imaginative mind arises,
blossoms; after him the work passes into the hands of _dii minores_,
pupils or imitators, who add, abridge, modify: such is the order. The
many-times written history of the application of steam, from the time of
the eolipile of Hero of Alexandria to the heroic period of Newcomen and
Watt, and the improvements made since their time, is one proof of the
statement. Another example:--the machine for measuring duration is at
first