Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 20, 1909.djvu/44

 30 gift man possesses. There is no higher training conceivable than that of the imaginative faculties of man. What is ambition but an expression of imagination? How could we understand patriotism, self-sacrifice, duty, or hope, if our imagination were not stirred, if it did not conjure up vistas of far-off lands and nations, paying homage to one law and to one rule? What would politics and religion, the two poles round which the whole of human life turns, be without that power of imagination, which on the one side sees mankind uplifted and glory everlasting bestowed, and on the other the firm establishment of society on the basis of truth and justice? Take imagination away, and we are hurled down from the height of bliss to the depth of despair. Our education would soon come to a standstill. Not even the most practical science can be taught, unless the enthusiasm of the student is first roused and the scholar's imagination fired by some glowing picture of success or discovery. When we rear up the coming generation and establish our commonwealth, it is always imagination that precedes the practical deed. What would the world be without its poetry, without its beauty, Even utilitarianism cannot dispense with the help of imagination, and this gift of imagination is happily one of those in which the masses participate to a far larger extent than the so-called classes. Among the latter the power of imagination is often crippled and shrivelled up through materialistic tendencies and narrow-minded egotism, through pedantry and self-imposed social fetters; but from the masses renewing forces rise from time to time, and bring fresh light and fresh blood into the decaying ranks of the higher circle of society. The few gifts which society often grudgingly grants are a thousandfold repaid by the poetical imagination of the people, by that literature which they have made their own, and which they return to the givers, in a purified, elevated, and more dignified form. Thus by that mutual play of popular