He had invented a monopoly which shared its profits with the people, and which the people trusted. He was a Luther Burbank in money and people instead of chestnuts. He raised the standard of impossibility in people, and invented a new way for human nature to work.
CHAPTER VI
THE IMAGINATION OF CROWDS
The modern imagination takes, speaking roughly, three characteristic forms:
1. Imagination about the unseen or intangible—the spiritual—as especially typified in electricity, in the wireless telegraph, the aeroplane: a new and extraordinary sense of the invisible and the unproved as an energy to be used and reckoned with.
2. Imagination about the future—a new and extraordinary sense of what is going to happen next in the world.
3. Imagination about people. We are not only inventing new machines, but our new machines have turned upon us and are creating new men. The telephone changes the structure of the brain. Men live in wider distances, and think in larger figures, and become eligible to nobler and wider motives.
Imagination about the unseen is going to give us in an incredible degree the mastery of the spirit over matter.
Imagination about the future is going to make the next few hundred years an organic part of every man's life to-day.