A literary habit has accustomed us to speak of the Middle Ages as the Ages of Faith ; and it is no doubt our fond hope that future generations will speak of us by contrast as the Age of Reason. But unless future generations are hypnotized by our pretensions, we are much more likely to be known as the Age of Imagination. We are enormously busied over imagination. We have even reached the position in which we are scientifically educating imagination, developing it and with cold deliberation harnessing it to practical purposes. Yes, it is really quite unfair for an age that dabbles in Spiritism, Christian Science, Theosophy, and Pelmanism to pretend to be reasonable. Possibly the ages that lay between medieval times and our own have some right to that name ; but, since, fortunately, both Queen Anne and Queen Victoria are dead, we have no business to be claiming it. Reason is probably all very well in its way, but not in everybody else’s way.

Now imagination has immense powers. It has founded the Daily Mail, canonized Mrs. Eddy, and deceived “eminent scientists” like Oliver Lodge and Arthur Conan Doyle, whom it is not unkind or frivolous to call dazed knights. Of course it hasn’t deceived them in matters where they know more than we do, in science and literature ; but only in matters where we are at least on their level, at the séance. People ask breathlessly whether one’s faith isn’t upset by this earnest belief in spooks publicly professed by our dazed knights.