PRINCIPLES DETERMINING METHOD. 163 



us to look into the future, just as memory enables us to 

 recall the past. 



Imagination plays a most important part in mature 

 science, as Professor Tyndall has shown in his essay on 

 the " Scientific Use of the Imagination." On imagina- 

 tion, applied to and tested by facts, controlled by reason, 

 depend the grandest conceptions and generalizations of 

 the human mind, the law of gravitation, the nebular 

 hypothesis, the theory of evolution. 



On- the other hand, imagination not based on facts, 

 or not controlled or directed by reason, is exceedingly 

 harmful. 



In the reaction against the education of verbal memo- 

 rizing and return to the natural education of seeing, 

 there is a tendency to discredit the educational value of 

 imagination. Not infrequently scientists aver that it 

 is utterly wrong to encourage the children to put into 

 nature anything they cannot see ; that, for instance, the 

 lessons in elementary science which emphasize or dwell 

 on the idea of protection in the study of the buds of 

 pussy-willow or horse-chestnut are absurd and unscien- 

 tific. As a fact, without imagination we could get no 

 conception of life processes, of which only the results 

 can be directly perceived. 



Nature* however, endows the child with a strong 

 imagination, and indicates its importance as an aid in 

 his education. Imagination is the instrument by which 

 the child looks from and through his little world of 

 sense to the greater universe beyond his childish senses, 

 for which he must be prepared. Through his imagina- 



