IMAGINATION
The creative imagination of science is based upon truth.—If, a century ago, some one had told the men who were traveling in stage-coaches and using oil-lamps that some day New York would blaze with light at midnight; that men would ask for succor in mid-ocean and that their message would be understood on land, that their flight in the air would surpass that of the eagle—our good forefathers would have smiled incredulously. Their imaginations would never have been able to conceive these things. To them, modern men would have seemed almost like men of another species.
This is because the imagination of modern men is based upon the positive researches of science, whereas the men of past ages allowed their minds to wander in the world of unreality.
This single fact has changed the face of the world.
When man loses himself in mere speculations, his environment will remain unchanged, but when imagination starts from contact with reality, thought begins to construct works by means of which the external world becomes transformed; almost as if the thought of man had assumed a marvelous power: the power to create.
It is thus we imagine the thought of God; all creation is the divine thought, which has the property of realizing itself. God thought: and behold! light, the order of creation, living things, appeared.
Modern man by the method of positive science seems to have found the secret trace of thought which puts him in the divine path, which gives him the revelation of his true nature, as indicated in the words of Scripture: "Let us make man in our image and likeness."
Thus human intelligence said: "Let there be light"—and there was a magic effulgence which comes and goes at a touch. "Let man fly in the air and rise far above all the birds of creation"—and it was so. "Let the voices of shipwrecked mariners travel mysteriously and without sound, and reach distant places"—and it was so. "Let things multiply, plants in their varieties, so that all men may have the means of life more abundantly"—and it was so.
The imagination has created when it has started from creation: that is, when it has first taken in existing truth. Only then has it accomplished marvelous things.