"Not at all a faculty, but your very highest self, your own life in creative activity. Your reason _is_ a faculty, and is subordinate to the purposes of your imagination. If, instead of regarding imagination as a pendant to your mental organization, you take it for what it is, a function, and the noblest one your mind knows, you will see at once why it is that it works unconsciously, just as you live unconsciously and involuntarily. Men set their reason and feeling to subdue what they consider a treacherous element in themselves; they succeed only in dwarfing their natures, and imagination is inert while reason controls; but when reason rests in sleep, and you cease to live to the external world, imagination resumes its normal power. You dream;--it is only the revival of that which you smother when you are awake. You consider the sights and sounds of yesterday follies; you reason;--imagination demonstrates its power by overturning your reason and deceiving your very senses." "You speak of its creations; I understand this in a certain sense; but if these were such, should not they have permanence? and can anything created perish?" "Nonsense! what will these trees be tomorrow? and the rocks you sit on, are they not changing to vegetation under you? The only creation is that of ideas; things are thin shadows. If man is not creative, he is still undeveloped." "But is not such an assumption trenching on the supremacy of God?" I asked. "What do you understand by 'God?'" "An infinitely wise and loving Controller of events, of course," I replied. "Did you ever find any one whose ideas on the subject agreed with yours?" "Not entirely." "Then your God is not the same as the God of other men; from the Fee-Jeean to the Christian there is a wide range. Of course there is a first great principle of life; but this personality you all worship, is it not a creation?"