will become ministers of the Church, others physicians, others lawyers, others professors, teachers, authors, investigators—all of you citizens and men. Apply, I entreat you, the general purport of what I have said each to your individual case. Future ministers of religion, what will the use of imagination be to you? It will be the secret of your power over others, the spell by which you will win your way into the hearts of your flock. What will it avail you to thunder words from the pulpit which will strike the minds of your hearers, only to rebound from them, and will fail to gain an entrance through those intricate channels which a sympathetic imagination alone can map out for your guidance? To you, above all, the power of realizing the thoughts and feelings of others is the highest gift you can possess, the best faculty you can cultivate.

Doubtless many among you look forward to a scholastic career. You will become schoolmasters, professors, teachers of various branches of knowledge to various classes. If, in entering upon your duties, you do not vigorously apply your imaginative faculties, you will be no better than mere machines, pouring out knowledge but not pouring it in. How much talent, how much research, how much splendid work has been wasted, because it is carelessly poured over the side of the vessel which it was intended to fill! No depth of learning, no fluency of speech will rescue the teacher from much barren work, if he lacks the capacity to place himself in touch with those whom he desires to instruct. And how can that magic bond be established except by the power to understand and feel that to which imagination must be our guide?

Do you think that experience will act as a substitute? Scarcely; though doubtless it renders invaluable help. But so infinite are the diversities of the human organism that the necessity for sympathetic interest can never be replaced. That is the one side, but do not forget the other. You must not only have this sympathetic insight yourselves, but you must aim at rousing the imaginations of your pupils; and that, not only because, as I have endeavored to show to-day, it is a faculty which will be of the highest value to them in study and in life, but also because it is through the imagination of the pupil that

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you may bring interest and fascination into the weary round of tasks. How infinitely dull is geography as a study of names and outlines; how thrilling when on the wings of imagination the learner is transported to the splendor and gloom of tropical forests, or "palms and temples of the South." But I resist the temptation to expand this topic, lest I should be led to stray from my theme of to-day, which is the uses to which imagination may be put, in the kindred theme of its cultivation-the subject of a former address.

I need not follow out the application of my theories to all the professions which you are likely to enter. I must leave something to your-imagination. Let me simply declare that I cannot conceive the vocation, however simple, however humdrum, however tied down to the dullest prose of life, which does not afford ample scope for the exercise of that bright faculty, on the virtues of which I hope that you will not think that I have dilated with undue enthusiasm. Still I cannot part from my subject or from you, without having said something on its special use to every one of you as citizens and men. In these days none of you can escape from some responsibility in helping shape the destinies of your country, and in influencing that current of changes in our social system which is sweeping along with a quickening course. Large issues of State policy or of social economy will, soon after the student is metamorphosed into the voter, be submitted to you in the discharge of your duties as citizens. On these questions, above all, exercise your faculty of transporting yourselves mentally to the point of view of your opponents; on these questions, above all, bring trained prospective imagination to bear.

In the conflicts of classes, in the struggles of parties, the habit and the power of realizing the standpoint of both sides are scarcely less important for the success of any cause of which you may be champions than the firm belief in the truth of your convictions. And with regard to questions of State, let your minds not concentrate themselves too much on the circumstances of the moment. Carry them forward to the future. Endeavor mentally to realize the conditions under which the changes submitted to your judgment will have to work themselves out,

I admit the extreme complexity of the task. Who can foresee with any degree of regulated accuracy the play even of the simpler forces of nature under the slightest change of conditions? The slaughter of insignificant animals, a check to the activity of the tiniest carriers of nature's fertilizing dusts, may have a far-reaching effect on the produce of vast areas of cultivated soil.

Do you remember an instance of a very curious character which was adduced by Darwin? The fertilizing of plants can in some cases only be effected by a particular species of insect. Bumblebees are necessary in order to enable the red clover to produce seed. Field-mice are the foes of bumblebees, and destroy their nests underneath the ground. Cats are the enemies of field-mice, and thus, if cats should be decimated, either in consequence of penal taxation, often pressed upon the Chancellor of the Exchequer, or by any other scourge, there would be such an increase in the number of field-mice that bumblebees would be exterminated, and fields of clover would lie in barren hopelessness, unable to produce a future crop.

Or, again, are you acquainted with the result of the well-meant but ill-considered introduction of the rabbit to our Australian colonies? The gift became a curse in the changed conditions of animal and vegetable and human life at the Antipodes, and no parallel to a Hares and Rabbits Bill would serve to keep down the terrible pest. So again, in the vegetable world, the consequences of a single act can often not be gauged except by imaginative foresight.

The man who carried water-cresses to New Zealand had not read "Jack and the Bean Stalk." Wallace tells us how this humble and tasty weed, transplanted to its new home, sheds its appetizing qualities, and, growing with rampant vigor in changed conditions of climate and soil, forms stems twelve feet long and blocks mighty rivers instead of filling the baskets of the industrious hawker.

And if the fates of the lower animals and flowers and plants, with their simpler organisms or under simpler laws, present such astounding and unexpected changes when transferred to new conditions, if it is difficult to discern the end of the chain of causation which is set in motion by some apparently simple and self-contained change,

what forethought, what careful prospective imagination, what effort to realize future possibilities must we not suminon to our aid when we have to deal with complex, incalculable, powerful man-man swayed by a thousand diversities of motive, man whose passionate organism science can scarcely classify, man who is master not only of his own fate, but of numberless forces of nature! Nay, more, if the probable action of a single man under changed conditions is a problem of the most complex kind, what shall we say of the complexity of the problem when we have to deal with men in the mass? Yet problems dealing with men in the mass will inevitably be submitted to your judgment as citizens. You will not be able to solve them by the easy process of the Utopian novelists. You will not be able, like them, to eliminate all human passions. Passions will not have been suppressed in your time. It will not be safe to rest the laws which you may be called on to enact on the assumption of supernatural and unattainable goodness. Progress we hope and know there will be, but human infirmities will not have disappeared in your generation. You will still be bound to remember the teachings of nature and reckon with a natural, though most complex, sequence of causes and effects. Let us put away from our thoughts present controversies, which, before the students of to-day enter the polling booth as responsible householders, may possibly have been settled one way or another.

Think of questions which the future may bring forth. I submit simply two or three illustrations; your own ingenuity will suggest many others. Fancy a question as to transplanting the sober growth of some British institution, the product of this temperate zone, to some tropical clime, to some more forcing soil. Remember the watercresses. Let your imagination realize in time how changes in conditions modify and falsify expected results. Or fancy problems affecting the relations of some parts of the community to others. Fancy proposals by which the extermination or the paralysis of some genus or species of the human social family might be brought about. Remember the sudden barrenness of the field of clover, the result of suppression of nature's fertilizing dusts. Questions of labor will be always with you, however the con

troversies of the day may end. Bear in mind the serious consequences which may ensue to the well-being of the vast organization on which the prosperity of the people rests, by any miscalculation of the facts resulting from neglect of some apparently insignificant cause.

On all such issues, aye, and on all problems which a governing people such as ours has to solve, the faculty of imaginative foresight will be your most faithful guide. You will not neglect the lessons of historical experience, but you will test those lessons and correct them, and amplify them, by the exercise of what I ask you to consider as one of the most precious faculties which Providence has implanted in the human breast-the faculty of wise, sympathetic, disciplined, prospective imagination.