Imagine

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.

abridged

From ‘The Higher Education of Women’ (1866), by Emily Davies (1830-1921). Additional information from ‘Women's Suffrage; A Short History of a Great Movement’ (1911) by Dame Millicent Garrett Fawcett (1847-1929).

* See also Hubert Parry on Youth and Age.

Précis
Davies noted how difficult it was for anyone to put herself in the shoes of another, whether it was the rich and the poor, or the young and the old. Only a lively imagination can do this. Without it, elusive but grave social ills quickly follow and every field of study is the better for it.
Questions for Critics

1. What is the author aiming to achieve in writing this?

2. Note any words, devices or turns of phrase that strike you. How do they help the author communicate her ideas more effectively?

3. What impression does this passage make on you? How might you put that impression into words?

Based on The English Critic (1939) by NL Clay, drawing on The New Criticism: A Lecture Delivered at Columbia University, March 9, 1910, by J. E. Spingarn, Professor of Comparative Literature in Columbia University, USA.

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