So far as we realize the world at all beyond the limit of our
private experience of it, we do so by the power of the imagination
acting on the lines of reason. It fills space and time for us through
all their compass. Nor is it less operative in the practical pursuits of
men. The scientist lights his way with it; the statesman forecasts
reform by it, building in thought the state which he afterward realizes
in fact; the entire future lives to us--and it is the most important
part of life--only by its incantation. The poet acts no otherwise in
employing it than the inventor and the speculator even, save that he
uses it for the ends of reason instead of for his private interest. In
some parts of this field there is, or was once, or will be, a physical
parallel, an actuality, containing the verification of the imagined
state of things; but so, for the poet, there is a parallel, a conception
of the reason just as normal, which is not the less real because it is a
tissue of abstract thought. In art this governance of the imagination by
the reason is fundamental, and gives to the office of the latter a
seeming primacy; and therefore emphasis is rightly placed on the
universal element, the truth, as the substance of the artistic form.
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