All this apparatus and opportunity, and no immortal soul!  Yet by faith and a study of the signs we proclaim that this lantern of wizard-drama is going to give us in time the visible things in the fulness of their primeval force, and some that have been for a long time invisible.  To speak in a metaphor, we are going to have the primitive life of Genesis, then all that evolution after:  Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, Joshua, Judges, and on to a new revelation of St. John.  In this adolescence of Democracy the history of man is to be retraced, the same round on a higher spiral of life.

Our democratic dream has been a middle-class aspiration built on a bog of toil-soddened minds.  The piles beneath the castle of our near-democratic arts were rotting for lack of folk-imagination.  The Man with the Hoe had no spark in his brain.  But now a light is blazing.  We can build the American soul broad-based from the foundations.  We can begin with dreams the veriest stone-club warrior can understand, and as far as an appeal to the eye can do it, lead him in fancy through every phase of life to the apocalyptic splendors.

This progress, according to the metaphor of this chapter, will be led by prophet-wizards.  These were the people that dominated the cave-men of old.  But what, more specifically, are prophet-wizards?

Let us consider two kinds of present-day people:  scientific inventors, on the one hand, and makers of art and poetry and the like, on the other.  The especial producers of art and poetry that we are concerned with in this chapter we will call prophet-wizards:  men like Albert Duerer, Rembrandt, Blake, Elihu Vedder, Watts, Rossetti, Tennyson, Coleridge, Poe, Maeterlinck, Yeats, Francis Thompson.

They have a certain unearthly fascination in some one or many of their works.  A few other men might be added to the list.  Most great names are better described under other categories, though as much beloved in their own way.  But these are especially adapted to being set in opposition to a list of mechanical inventors that might be called realists by contrast:  the Wright brothers, and H. Pierpont Langley, Thomas A. Edison, Charles Steinmetz, John Hays Hammond, Hudson Maxim, Graham Bell.

The prophet-wizards are of various schools.  But they have a common tendency and character in bringing forth a type of art peculiarly at war with the realistic civilization science has evolved.  It is one object of this chapter to show that, when it comes to a clash between the two forces, the wizards should rule, and the realists should serve them.

The two functions go back through history, sometimes at war, other days in alliance.  The poet and the scientist were brethren in the centuries of alchemy.  Tennyson, bearing in mind such a period, took the title of Merlin in his veiled autobiography, Merlin and the Gleam.