Imagine

EVERY nowEVERY now and then some one recommends mathematics for girls as a curb to the imagination. It might be as well first to ascertain whether the imaginations of commonplace girls want to be curbed; whether, on the contrary, they do not want rather to be awakened and set to work, with something to work upon.

The business of the imagination is not merely to build castles in the air, though that is, no doubt, a useful and commendable exercise; it has other and most important duties to perform. For, manifestly, an unimaginative person is destitute of one of the main elements of sympathy. Probably, if the truth were known, it would be found that injustice and unkindness are comparatively seldom caused by harshness of disposition. They are the result of an incapacity for imagining ourselves to be somebody else. Any one who has tried it must be aware of the enormous difficulty of conceiving the state of mind of a pauper or a thief.

The same difficulty is experienced in a degree by any one in easy circumstances in realising the condition and looking from the point of view of a very poor, or comparatively poor person. It is probably equally difficult to ordinary minds to imagine the condition of always having more money than you quite know what to do with. The absence of sympathy between youth and age is traceable to the same want. Old people have either forgotten their own youth, or they remember it too well, and fall into the not less fatal mistake of supposing that the new youth is like their own. Young people, on their part, are equally at a loss to understand what it is to be old.

In all the relations of life, the want of imagination produces defective sympathy, and defective sympathy brings in its train all sorts of vague and intolerable evils. In every branch of study a vivid imagination is a most powerful agent, aiding the memory, and bringing clearly before the mind the materials on which a judgment has to be formed.