Into the pioneering families were gathered their most powerful imaginations. For imagination is the only clairvoyant of the faculties; it can see what lies below the horizon of knowledge; it can forecast the world as it might be and as it is to be; and it can draw the human mind onwards by the splendours of this forecast. This people had early realised the sibylline character of the faculty, and the great part it might play in their devotion to progress. And they resolved to save it from all waste. They refused to have it become the mere slave of luxury or of popular amusement, such as they saw it was in most other civilised nations. Even where it conjured up the past in magnificent literary pictures, what else was it than the pander to tastes and habits that were overworn, the encomiast of deeds that had better be buried in oblivion? It frequented the palaces of kings and licked the dust off their feet, or it played the buffoon to the indolent, sensuous crowd. At rare times it isolated itself, and, heedless of the babbling world that offered it so many prizes, it wrestled with the powers of darkness and ignorance. But what could a poor recluse do against the infinite night? If it were to help the forward march of humanity, it must be disciplined and organised to a definite aim. All other peoples have left imagination to struggle for itself. This people recognised it as the most unschooled and shiftless of the human faculties, whilst they felt it to be the most divine and fullest of promise. They determined that amongst them it should lose its reeling gait and wandering, aimless eye, and become the pioneer of their march onwards; instead of fixing its eye on the past or on the favours of the great, it should skirmish before the main army into the region of the unknown; it should report on the difficulties and the enemies to be met, and map out the world as it was to be. What would be thought of the shipmaster who let the keenest-eyed of his crew lounge round the ship looking into the pockets of his comrades and making them laugh, or lean over the stern watching the track left behind, if darkness and cloud and a broken sea ever lay on the horizon ahead? What else were the nations doing with their lookout faculty, imagination, but allowing it to waste itself on providing amusement for the luxurious, or on figuring the problem of the past?