“There are two things in the outer creation, which, according to the great Hermes, suffice for the operation of all that is wonderful and glorious--Fire and Earth. Even so, my child, there are in the human mind two powers that affect all of which our nature is capable--reason and imagination. Now mankind,--less wise in themselves than in the outer world--have cultivated, for the most part, but one of these faculties; and that the inferior and more passive, reason. They have tilled the earth of the human heart, but suffered its fire to remain dormant, or waste itself in chance and frivolous directions. Hence the insufficiency of human knowledge. Inventions founded only on reason move within a circle from which their escape is momentary and trivial. When some few, endowed with a just instinct, have had recourse to the diviner element, imagination, thou wilt observe, that they have used it only in the service of the lighter arts, and those chiefly disconnected from reason. Such is poetry and music, and other delicious fabrications of genius, that amuse men, soften men, but _advance_ them not. They have--with but rare exceptions--left this glorious and winged faculty utterly passive in the service of Philosophy. There, reason alone has been admitted, and imagination hath been carefully banished, as an erratic and deceitful meteor. Now mark me, child: I, noting this our error in early youth, did resolve to see what might be effected by the culture of this renounced and maltreated element; and finding, as I proceeded in the studies that grew from this desire, by the occult yet guiding writings of the great philosophers of old, that they had forestalled me in this discovery, I resolved to learn, from their experience, by what means the imagination is best fostered, and, as it were, sublimed.