Page:The kernel and the husk (Abbott, 1886).djvu/69

Letter 6] to the purpose. But imaginative love, or sympathy, gives us the key to the knowledge of all human nature, and is the foundation of all domestic and social unity and order.

As to the test of Imagination when brought to bear upon human nature, you will remember, I dare say, that it was determined to be the success with which it "worked" human nature, or, in other words, made men do "what they are intended to do." But I was then speaking of the way in which the great prophets, lawgivers, and founders of religions have influenced great masses of mankind, and in which almost every mother influences her children, by idealizing them. I might have added, and I will now add, a word on the manner in which an imaginary ideal of human nature proves its truth experimentally to the imaginer, by "working" him, that is, by making him capable of doing "the work he was intended to do." It is the more necessary to do this because the illusions of Imagination are nowhere so strong and so lasting as in the study of human Nature; and there is a danger that we may be deterred by the thought of them from steadily pursuing the truth. The cynic tells us with a sneer that babies, and none but babies, think men and women better than they are, and that, the older one grows, the more one is disillusionised about the virtue of human nature. But that is not true, or only a half truth. If we, as children, imagine the men and women about us to be perfections of power, wisdom, and virtue, one reason is, that we have, as children, a most inadequate standard of physical, mental, and moral excellence. As our standard rises, our sense of inadequacy increases; but the reason why, as we grow older, we cease to think people perfect, is, very often, not that we think worse of human beings, but that we think better of human possibilities.

But in some minds defect of Imagination combines with other causes to induce the repeatedly disillusionised