In common speech, however, imagination is deprived of this broader significance, and is restricted to its relations with art. Art is not progress, though progress implies art. It differs from progress chiefly in disclaiming the practical element. You cannot apply a poem, a picture, or a strain of music, to material necessities; they are not food, clothing, or shelter. Only after these physical wants are assuaged, does art supervene. Its sphere is exclusively mental and moral. But this definition is not adequate; a further distinction is needed. For such things as mathematics, moral philosophy, and political economy also belong to the mental sphere, and yet they are not art. But these, though not actually existing on the plane of material necessities, yet do exist solely in order to relieve such necessities. Unlike beauty, they are not their own excuse for being. Their embodiment is utilitarian, that of art is aesthetic. Political economy, for example, shows me how to buy two drinks for the same price I used to pay for one; while art inspires me to transmute a pewter mug into a Cellini goblet. My physical nature, perhaps, prefers two drinks to one; but, if my taste be educated, and I be not too thirsty, I would rather drink once from the Cellini goblet than twice from the mug. Political economy gravitates towards the material level; art seeks incarnation only in order to stimulate anew the same spiritual faculties that generated it. Art is the production, by means of appearances, of the illusion of a loftier reality; and imagination is the faculty which holds that loftier reality up for imitation. The disposition of these preliminaries brings us once more in sight of the goal of our pilgrimage. The novel, despite its name, is no new thing, but an old friend in a modern dress. Ever since the time of Cadmus,--ever since language began to express thought as well as emotion,--men have betrayed the impulse to utter in forms of literary art,--in poetry and story,--their conceptions of the world around them. According to many philologists, poetry was the original form of human speech. Be that as it may, whatever flows into the mind, from the spectacle of nature and of mankind, that influx the mind tends instinctively to reproduce, in a shape accordant with its peculiar bias and genius. And those minds in which imagination is predominant, impart to their reproductions a balance and beauty which stamp them as art. Art--and literary art especially--is the only evidence we have that this universal frame of things has relation to our minds, and is a universe and not a poliverse. Outside revelation, it is our best assurance of an intelligent purpose in creation.