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Some of our boys will be farmers but, if they lack imagination, they will
be dull fellows, at the very best, and, relatively speaking, not far above
the horse that draws the plow. The girls will be able to talk, but if they
lack imagination they can never become conversationalists. The person who
has imagination can cause the facts of the multiplication table to
scintillate and glow. The person who lacks imagination is unable to invest
with interest and charm even the mountain, the river, the landscape, or
the poem. The gossip, the scandal-monger, or the coarse jester proves his
lack of imagination and his consequent inability to hold his own in real
conversation. We hope, of course, that some of our pupils may become
inventors, but this will be impossible unless they possess imagination. A
sociologist states the case in this fashion: "Wealth, the transient, is
material; achievement, the enduring, is immaterial. The products of
achievement are not material things at all. They are not ends, but means.
They are methods, ways, devices, arts, systems, institutions. In a word,
they are _inventions_." In short, to say that one is an inventor is but
another way of saying that he has imagination.
It is one thing to know facts but quite another thing to know the
significance of facts. And imagination is the alembic that discovers the
significance of the facts. A thousand men of England knew the facts
touching the life and education of the children of that country, but the
facts remained mere facts until the imagination of Dickens interpreted
them and thus emancipated childhood from the thralldom of ignorance and
cruelty.
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