NewThoughtLibrary.com / DivineLibrary.org

guise. The very fact that the senses find such complete repose in sleep while the imagination is so bold, dashing and wayward, would seem to indicate that the action of the two is far from identical. The same is true in reverie, in day-dreaming. The mind closes its senses, takes out these airy steeds of fancy, throws the rein on their necks, and gives itself up to the luxury of motion along ways in which the friction of ruts, the jar of collisions, and delay of wheels lifting slowly in the mud are not experienced.

The imagination also greatly aids our thoughts. The judgment and the fancy are frequently regarded as faculties somewhat opposed to each other in their action. The ease and certainty of the first, in some of its most severe and logical processes, depend very much on the clearness and precision of the second. In solid geometry, in many branches of the higher mathematics, in mechanics, in astronomy, a first condition for the ready and safe movement of the thoughts, is a clear unwavering image of the solid, or of the objects and their relations, involved in the problem. If the subject of contemplation cannot be easily evoked, and quietly held in the field of imagination, the judgment is at once at fault in establishing its connections, and gropes in the darkness, like one blindfolded. Scientific inquiry also, the tracing of analogies, the observation of resemblances, are greatly aided by a vivid imagination, presenting distinctly to the mind a large circle of objects. The memory is but very partial in its action without this faculty, and the mind, in the weakness of representation, is compelled to take up objects singly, to the oversight of dependencies which might furnish the key of success. The imagination, then, is as essential to philosophy as to poetry. The difference, lies in the two cases, not so much in the number of objects presented, as in the manner and purpose of consideration.

Most immediate and powerful is the influence of the