xii.] VALUE OF IMAGINATION. 229 



modest and attentive person, to whom it is worth while 

 to open a little of his forty or fifty thousand years' 

 experience. 



Second only to the good effect of this study on the 

 logical faculty, seems to me to be its effect on the 

 imagination. Not merely in such objects as the pebble, 

 whose history I have so hastily, but I must add faith- 

 fully, sketched ; but in the tiniest piece of mould on a- 

 decayed fruit, the tiniest animalcule from the stagnant 

 pool, will imagination find inexhaustible wonders, and 

 fancy a fairy-land. And I beg my elder hearers not 

 to look on this as light praise. Imagination is a valuable 

 thing ; and even if it were not, it is a thing, a real 

 thing, a faculty which every one has, and with whick 

 you must do something. You cannot ignore it ; it will 

 assert its own existence. You will be wise not to 

 neglect it in young children ; for if you do not provide 

 wholesome food for it, it will find unwholesome food 

 for itself. I know that many, especially men of busi- 

 ness, are inclined to sneer at it, and ask what is the 

 use of it ? The simple answer is, God has made it ; 

 and He has made nothing in vain. But you will find 

 that in practice, in action, in business, imagination is 

 a most useful faculty, and is so much mental capital, 

 whensoever it is properly trained. Consider but this 

 one thing, that without imagination no man can pos- 

 sibly invent even the pettiest object ; that it is one of 

 the faculties which essentially raises man above the 

 brutes, by enabling him to create for himself; that 

 the first savage who ever made a hatchet must have 

 imagined that hatchet to himself ere he began it ; that 

 every new article of commerce, every new opening for 

 trade, must be arrived at by acts of imagination; by 



