But we may push our inquiry a step further, and find in imagination the cause of this strange force. For imagination, or the image-making faculty, may in a certain sense be said to be the creator of the world within. The separate senses furnish it with material, but to it alone is due the building of our castles, on premises of fact or in the air. For there is no impassable gulf between the two. Coleridge's distinction that imagination drew possible pictures and fancy impossible ones, is itself, except as a classification, an impossible distinction to draw; for it is only the inconceivable that can never be. All else is purely a matter of relation. We may instance dreams which are usually considered to rank among the most fanciful creations of the mind. Who has not in his dreams fallen repeatedly from giddy heights and invariably escaped unhurt? If he had attempted the feat in his waking moments he would assuredly have been dashed to pieces at the bottom. And so we say the thing is impossible. But is it? Only under the relative conditions of his mass and the earth's. If the world he happens to inhabit were not its present size, but the size of one of the tinier asteroids, no such disastrous results would follow a chance misstep. He could there walk off precipices when too closely pursued by bears--if I remember rightly the usual childish cause of the same--with perfect impunity. The bear could do likewise, unfortunately. We should have arrived at our conclusion even quicker had we decreased the size both of the man and his world. He would not then have had to tumble actually so far, and would therefore have arrived yet more gently at the foot. This turns out, then, to be a mere question of size. Decrease the scale of the picture, and the impossible becomes possible at once. All fancies are not so easily reducible to actual facts as the one we have taken, but all, perhaps, eventually may be explicable in the same general way. At present we certainly cannot affirm that anything may not be thus explained. For the actual is widening its field every day. Even in this little world of our own we are daily discovering to be fact what we should have thought fiction, like the sailor's mother the tale of the flying fish. Beyond it our ken is widening still more. Gulliver's travels may turn out truer than we think. Could we traverse the inter-planetary ocean of ether, we might eventually find in Jupiter the land of Lilliput or in Ceres some old-time country of the Brobdignagians. For men constituted muscularly like ourselves would have to be proportionately small in the big planet and big in the small one. Still stranger things may exist around other suns. In those bright particular stars--which the little girl thought pinholes in the dark canopy of the sky to let the glory beyond shine through--we are finding conditions of existence like yet unlike those we already know. To our groping speculations of the night they almost seem, as we gaze on them