From the most concrete of inventions to the most abstract of conceptions the same force reveals itself upon examination; for there is no gulf between what we call practical and what we consider theoretical.

Everything abstract is ultimately of practical use, and even the most immediately utilitarian has an abstract principle at its core.

We are too prone to regard the present age of the world as preeminently practical, much as a middle-aged man laments the witching fancies of his boyhood.

But, and there is more in the parallel than analogy, if the man be truly imaginative he is none the less so at forty-five than he was at twenty, if his imagination have taken on a more critical form; for this latter half of the nineteenth century is perhaps the most imaginative period the world's history has ever known.
While with one hand we are contriving means of transit for our ideas, and even our very voices, compared to which Puck's girdle is anything but talismanic, with the other we are stretching out to grasp the action of mind on mind, pushing our way into the very realm of mind itself.
History tells the same story in detail; for the history of mankind, imperfectly as we know it, discloses the fact that imagination, and not the power of observation nor the kindred capability of perception, has been the cause of soul-evolution.
The savage is but little of an imaginative being.

We are tempted, at times, to imagine him more so than he is, for his fanciful folk-lore.
The proof of which overestimation is that we find no difficulty in imagining what he does, and even of imagining what he probably imagined, and finding our suppositions verified by discovery.