USE OF THE IMAGINATION: 421 



from downright sensible experience. Still the imagination 

 is to some extent exercised. The bodily eye, for example, 

 cannot see the condensations and rarefactions of the waves 

 of sound. We construct them in thought, and we believe 

 as firmly in their existence as in that of the air itself. But 

 now our experience is to be carried into a new region, 

 where a new use is to be made of it. Having mastered the 

 cause and mechanism of sound, we desire to know the 

 cause and mechanism of light. We wish to extend our 

 inquiries from the auditory to the optic nerve. There is 

 in the human intellect a power of expansion I might 

 almost call it a power of creation which is brought into 

 play by the simple brooding upon facts. The legend of 

 the spirit brooding over chaos may have originated in ex- 

 perience of this power. In the case now before us it has 

 manifested itself by transplanting into space, for the pur- 

 poses of light, an adequately modified form of the mech- 

 anism of sound. We know intimately whereon the velocity 

 of sound depends. When we lessen the density of the 

 aerial medium, and preserve its elasticity constant, we aug- 

 ment the velocity. When we heighten the elasticity, and 

 keep the density constant, we also augment the velocity. 

 A small density, therefore, and a great elasticity, are the 

 two things necessary to rapid propagation. Now light is 

 known to move with the astounding velocity of 180,000 

 miles a second. How is such a velocity to be obtained? 

 By boldly diffusing in space a mediunT of the requisite 

 tenuity and elasticity. 



Let us make such a medium our starting-point, and, 

 endowing it with one or two other necessary qualities, let 

 us handle it in accordance with strict mechanical laws. 

 Let us then carry our results from the world of theory into 

 the world of sense, and see whether our deductions do not 

 issue in the very phenomena of light which ordinary knowl- 

 edge and skilled experiment reveal. If in all the multi- 

 plied varieties of these phenomena, including those of the 

 most remote and entangled description, this fundamental 

 conception always bring us face to face with the truth; if 

 no contradiction to our deductions from it be found in 

 external nature, but on all sides agreement and verifica- 

 tion; if, moreover, as in the case of Conical Refraction and 

 in other cases, it actually forces upon our attention phe- 

 nomena which no eye had previously seen, and which no 



