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The Review of Reviews, 



WHAT IS IMAGINATION? 



" Everything," Says Mr. Stanley Lee. 



Mr. Gerald Stanley Lee, the author of " Inspired 

 Millionaires," contributes a characteristic article to the 

 Hibhert Journal for April, entitled " Business, Good- 

 ness, and Imagination." 



The real drift of the article is to assert that 

 imagination is everything. Imagination is business ; 

 imagination is goodness ; imagination is the god that 

 is to deliver us from the evil in this world. If anyone 

 does evil it is because he has not sufficient imagination. 

 The Jews crucified Christ because they had not sufficient 

 imagination. Hence Christ, when dying, could say, 

 " Father, forgive them, for they know not what they 

 do." Why ? Because they had not sufficient imagina- 

 tion. Goodness, says Mr. Lee, is essentially imagina- 

 tion — it is brains ; it is thinking down through to 

 what one really wants. g 



Imagination needs to have time to work. If people 

 do things in a hurry, without taking the time to think, 

 they do wrong things, things which they themselves 

 regret having done. People crucified Christ because 

 they were in a hurry : — 



They did what they wanted to do at the moment. They did 

 not do what they would have wished they had done in twenty 

 years. I would define goodness as doing what one would wish 

 one had done in twenty years — twenty years, twenty days, 

 twenty minutes, twenty seconds, according to the time the action 

 takes to get ripe. 



On the other hand, sin is doing something that you 

 know you ought not to do ; but most sins are com- 

 mitted because people don't see what it is they are 

 doing. Jesus Christ Himself, in speaking of the most 

 colossal sin that has ever been committed, seemed to 

 think that when men committed a sin it was because 

 they did not really see what it was that they were doing. 



If two great shops could stand side by side in the 

 main street of the world, all the vices in one window, 

 and all the virtues in the other, and if all the people 

 could pass by all day and all night and see the virtues 

 as they were and the vices as they were, all the 

 world would be good in the morning, and would 

 remain good so long as they remembered how the 

 windows looked : — 



If a man were to take a fancy to any particular vice and 

 would take a step up to the \^'indow, and take one real look at it in 

 the window, see it lying there, its twenty years' evil, its twenty 

 days', its twenty minutes' evil all branching up out of it, he 

 would be good. 



Mr. Stanley Lee says : — 



If God had arranged from the beginning slides of the virtues, 

 and had furnished every man with a stereoplicon inside, and if 

 all a man had to do at any particular time of temptation was to 

 take out just the right slide, or possibly try three or four up 

 there on his canvas a second, no one would ever have any 

 trouble in doing right. 



It can be seen that Mr. Lee is a confirmed optimist. 

 He says that we should recognise that no one ever 

 does wrong because he wants to, for he always wants 



to do right, but he cannot see what right doing is. 

 He tells us : — 



We shall see the men — all of tlie men and all of the good and 

 the evil in the men this moment, daily before our eyes working 

 out with implacable hopefidness the fate of the world. We 

 know that in spite of self-deceived syndicalism, and self-deceived 

 trusts, in spile of coal strikes, and all the vain, comic little 

 troops of warships around the earth, peace and righteousness in 

 a vast overtone are singing towards us. We are not only going 

 to have new and better motives in our modern men, but the 

 new and better motives are going to be thrust upon us. 



Mr. Lee concludes his article in the following charac- 

 teristic outburst : — 



Some of us have decided that we will never have anything to 

 do with monopoly. Presto ! there is suddenly evolved an 

 entirely new type of monopolist, the man who can be rich and 

 good, the millionaire who has invented a monopoly that serves 

 the owners, the producers, and employees, the distributors, and 

 the consumers alike. An American railway president has been 

 saying lately that America would not have enou:;h to eat in 

 2050 ; but it would not do to try to prove this just yet. .Some- 

 one will invent a food that is as highly concentrated as 

 dynamite, and the whole food supply of New York — who 

 knows? — shall be carried around in one railway president's 

 vest-pocket. • ' 



THE STANDARD FACE. 



Mr. E. S. Valentine, in the Strand, describes the 

 beauty meter, or kallometer, invented by Professor 

 W. B. Fotheringham : — 



Professor Fotheringham always starts from a horizontal line 

 drawn through the pupils of the eyes (which should be exactly 

 two and a half inches apart) when the gaze is directed level 

 immediately in front. From this point to a line drawn below 

 the opening of the^ nostril, the nose should be ore and seven- 

 eighth inches ; the upper lip should measure three-quarters of 

 an inch to the mean line of the mouth, and two inches from the 

 mouth to the bottom of the chin. 



THE IDEAL NOSE. 



There is a difficulty in reconciling the various 

 measurements of the Greek sculptors. The nose in the 

 Apollo Belvedere measures one and seven-eighths 

 inches ; in the Hermes of Pra.xitelcs it is two and one- 

 eighth inches ; in the Antinous it is two inches. But 

 the Greek sculptors had a tendency to make the nose 

 too long. The Professor says only one in a million fulfil 

 the canons of beauty. The writer applies the Pro- 

 fessor's standard to certain celebrities. He says : — 



For instance, William Makepeace Thackeray, besides being a 

 famous novelist, possessed a he.ad measuring nine and thrcL- 

 quarter inches long instead of eight and a half. Moreover, hi- 

 nostrils were half an inch above the standard, and his mouth a 

 quarter of an inch below it. Charles fiickens could boast an 

 almost beautiful mask. His great predecessor, Scott, was 

 abnormal in the height of his brov^ and the length of his upper 

 lip. If Scott belonged to the long-masked, Mr. Kipling 

 belongs to the squar-i-masked species. His chin, although 

 somewhat squarer, is luU Hellenic, but his forehead is lower and 

 his nose shorter. 



The standard face, according to Professor Fotheringham, 

 shoidd be of a certain width— some five and a half inches across 

 at a point just below the ear, and the eyes two and three-eighth 

 inches apart. This would make the"width of the head a full 

 seven inches, yet there arc heads only live and a half inchc- 

 wide, and eyes less than two inches ap,xrt ! 



