A Man's Value to Society: Studies in Self Culture and Character

by Newell Dwight Hillis

Now our busy, bustling age is inclined to under-estimate the imagination. Men cavil at castle-building. The pragmatist jeers at reveries. Men believe in stores, and goods in them; in factories, and wealth by them; men believe in houses and horses, but not in ideals. Nevertheless, thoughts and dreams are the stuff out of which towns and cities are builded. We may despise the silent dreamer, but in the last analysis he appears the real architect of states! Immeasurable the practical power of the vision faculty! The heroes of yesterday have all been sustained—not by swords and guns, but by the sight of the invisible!

Here is the old hero in his dungeon in Florence. While he dozed, the night before he was to be burned, the jailer saw a rare, sweet smile upon his face. "What is it?" the guard asked. "I hear the sounds of falling chains, and their clangor is like sweet music in my ears." Then, with smiling face he went to his martyrdom. And here is Michael Angelo. Grown old and blind, he gropes his way into the gallery of the Vatican, where with uplifted face his fingers feel their way over the torso of Phidias. Lingering by him one day the Cardinal Farnese heard the old sculptor say: "Great is this marble; greater still the hand that carved it; greatest of all, the God who fashioned the sculptor. I still learn! I still learn!" And he too went forward sustained by his vision of perfect beauty.

And here is John Huss, looking between the iron bars of his prison upon an army of pikes and spears, massed before his jail; but the martyr endured his danger by the foresight of the day when the swords then wielded for repression of liberty of thought would flash for its emancipation. And here is Walter Scott ruined by the failure of his publishers, just at the hour when nature whispered that he had fulfilled his task and earned his respite. But he girded himself anew for the battle, and sustained his grievous loss through the foresight of the hour when the last debt would be paid and his again would be a spotless name. And here is that youth, Emerson, looking out upon a world full of noise and strife, full of the cries of slaves and the warfare of zealots. He was sustained by the foresight of a day when God would breathe peace o'er all the scene. With hope shining in his face, he began to "take down men's idols with such reverence that it seemed an act of worship." And what shall we more say? By the sight of the invisible, Dante endured his scaffold; the heroes, hunted like partridges upon the mountains, endured their caves and the winter's cold; martyrs endured the scourge and fagot. In every age, the great, by the sight of the invisible, have been lifted into the realms of tranquillity. Outwardly, there may have been the roar and boom of guns, but inwardly men were lutes with singing harps. As the householder sitting by his blazing hearth thinks not of the sleet and hail falling on the roof of slate, so the soul abides in peace over which has been reared the castle and covert of God's presence.

How signal a place does the imagination hold in the realm of science and invention! Reason itself is only an under-servant. It has no creative skill. Memory makes no discoveries. But the imagination is a wonder-worker. One day, chancing upon a large bone of the mammoth in the Black Forest, Oken, the German naturalist, exclaimed: "This is a part of a spinal column." The eyes of the scientist saw only one of the vertebræ, but to that one bone his imagination added frame, limb and head, then clothed the skeleton with skin, and saw the giant of animals moving through the forest. In that hour the imagination wrought a revolution in the science of anatomy. Similarly, this creative faculty in Göethe gave botany a new scientific basis. Sitting in his favorite seat near the castle of Heidelberg one day, the great poet was picking in pieces an oak leaf. Suddenly his imagination transformed the leaf. Under its touch the central stalk lifted itself up and became the trunk of the tree; the veins of the leaf were extended and became boughs and branches; each filament became a leaf and spray; the imagination revealed each petal and stamen and pistil, as after the leaf type, and gave a new philosophy to the science of herbs and shrubs. When a pistachio tree in Paris with only female blossoms suddenly bore nuts, the mind of a scientist suggested that some other rich man had imported a tree with male flowers, and careful search revealed that tree many miles away.

And in every department of science this faculty bridges over chasms between discovered truths. Even Newton's discovery was the gift of imagination. When the eyes of the scientist saw the falling apple it was his vision faculty that leaped through space and saw the falling moon. When the western trade winds, blowing for weeks, had cast the drift wood upon the shores of Spain, Columbus' eyes fell not only upon the strange wood but also upon a pebble caught in the crevice. But his imagination leaped from the pebble to the Western continent of which the stone was a part, and from the tree to the forest in which it grew.

This faculty has performed a similar work in the realm of mechanics. Watt tells us that his engine worked in his mind years before it worked in his shop. In his biography, Milton recognizes the beauty of the trees and flowers he culled from earth's landscapes and gardens, but in his "Paradise Lost," his imagination beheld an Eden fairer than any scene ever found on earth. Napoleon believed that every battle was won by the imagination. While his soldiers slept, the great Corsican marshaled his troops, hurled them against the enemy, and won the victory in his mind the night before the battle was fought. Even the orator like Webster must be described as one who sees his argument in the air before he writes it upon the page, just as Handel thought he heard the music falling from the sky more rapidly than his hand could fasten the notes upon the musical bars. Thus every new tool and picture, every new temple or law or reform, has been the imagination's gift to man.

Nor has the case been different with men in the humbler walks of life. Multitudes are doomed to delve and dig. Three-fourths of the race live on the verge of poverty. The energies of most men are consumed in supporting the wants of the body. It is given to multitudes to descend into the coal mine ere the day is risen, to emerge only when night has fallen. Other multitudes toil in the smithy or tend the loom. The division of labor has closed many avenues for happiness and culture. The time was when the village cobbler was primarily a citizen, and only incidentally a shoemaker. In the old New England days the cobbler owned his garden and knew the orchard; owned his horse and knew the care of animals; had his special duties in relation to school and church, and, therefore, was a student of all public questions. But tending a machine that clinches tacks, cabins and confines the soul. The man who begins as a citizen ends an appendage to a wheel. The life of many becomes a treadmill existence. Year in and year out they tend some spindle. Now this drudgery of modern life threatens happiness and manhood. Therefore it was ordained that while the hand digs the mind may soar.

While Henry Clay's hands were hoeing corn in that field in Kentucky, through his imagination the young orator was standing in the halls of Congress. What orations he wrote! What arguments he fashioned! Each time his hoe cut down a weed, his mind with an argument hewed down an opponent. Never was there a tool for hoeing corn like unto the imagination! Christine Nilsson tells that once she toiled as a flower girl at the country fairs in Sweden. But all the time she delved she was dreaming, and by her very dreams making herself strong against the day when she would charm vast audiences with celestial music. What battles the plowboys have fought in dreams! What orations they have pronounced! What reforms they have achieved! What tools invented! What books written! What business reared! Thus the imagination shortens the hours of labor and sweetens toil. While the body tires, the soul soars and sings.

This young foreigner newly arrived in our city digs downward with his spade, but his imagination works upward into the realm of the invisible. He endures the ditch and the spade through foresight of the day when his playmate will come over the sea; when together they will own a little house, and have a garden with vines and flowers, with a little path leading down to "the spring where the water bubbles out day and night like a little poem from the heart of the earth;" when they will have a little competence, so that the sweet babe shall not want for knowledge. By that dream the youth sustains his loneliness and poverty; by that dream he conquers his vices and passions; at last through that dream he is lifted up to the rank of a patriot and worthy citizen. Nor shall you find one hard-worked man caught to-morrow in life's swirl who does not endure the strife, the rivalry and the selfishness of the street with this gift divine. It is the noblest instrument of the soul. Thereby are the heavens opened. Imagination is the poor man's friend and saviour. Imagination is God whispering to the soul what shall be when time and the divine resources have accomplished their work upon man.

And when imagination has achieved for man, his progress, happiness, and culture, it goes on to help him to gain personal worth and character. Above every noble soul hangs a vision of things higher, better and sweeter. It causes the best men even in their best moods to feel that better things still are possible. By sweet visions it tempts men upward, just as of old the bees were lured onward by the honey dropped through the hunter's hands. The vision of a higher manhood discontents men with to-day's achievement and takes the flavor out of yesterday's victory. In such hours it is not enough that men have bread and raiment, or are better than their fellows. The soul is filled with nameless yearnings and longings. The deeper convictions, long hidden, begin to stir and strain, even as in June the seed aches with its hidden harvest.