ctually so far, and
would therefore have arrived yet more gently at the foot. This turns
out, then, to be a mere question of size. Decrease the scale of the
picture, and the impossible becomes possible at once. All fancies are
not so easily reducible to actual facts as the one we have taken, but
all, perhaps, eventually may be explicable in the same general way.
At present we certainly cannot affirm that anything may not be thus
explained. For the actual is widening its field every day. Even in this
little world of our own we are daily discovering to be fact what we
should have thought fiction, like the sailor's mother the tale of
the flying fish. Beyond it our ken is widening still more. Gulliver's
travels may turn out truer than we think. Could we traverse the
inter-planetary ocean of ether, we might eventually find in Jupiter
the land of Lilliput or in Ceres some old-time country of the
Brobdignagians. For men constituted muscularly like ourselves would have
to be proportionately small in the big planet and big in the small
one. Still stranger things may exist around other suns. In those bright
particular stars--which the little girl thought pinholes in the dark
canopy of the sky to let the glory beyond shine through--we are finding
conditions of existence like yet unlike those we already know. To our
groping speculations of the night they almost seem, as we gaze on them
in their twinkling, to be winking us a sort of comprehension. Conditions
may exist there under which our wildest fancies may be commonplace
facts. There may be

"Some Xanadu where Kublai can
a stately pleasure dome decree,"

and carry out his conceptions to his own disillusionment, perhaps. For
if the embodiment of a fancy, however complete, left nothing further
to be wished, imagination would have no incentive to work. Coleridge's
distinction does very well to separate, empirically, certain kinds of
imaginative concepts from certain others; but it has no real foundation
in fact. Nor presumably did he mean it to have. But it serves, not
inaptly, as a text to point out an important scientific truth, namely,
that there are not two such qualities of the mind, but only one. For
otherwise we might have supposed the fact too evident to need mention.
Imagination is the single source of the new, the one mainspring of
psychical advance; reason, like a balance-wheel, only keeping the
action regular. For reason is but the touchstone of experience, our