2.  Imagination about the future—­a new and extraordinary sense of what is going to happen next in the world.

3.  Imagination about people.  We are not only inventing new machines, but our new machines have turned upon us and are creating new men.  The telephone changes the structure of the brain.  Men live in wider distances, and think in larger figures, and become eligible to nobler and wider motives.

Imagination about the unseen is going to give us in an incredible degree the mastery of the spirit over matter.

Imagination about the future is going to make the next few hundred years an organic part of every man’s life to-day.

The imagination of men about themselves and other people is going to give us a race of men with new motives; or, to put it differently, it is going to give us not only new sizes but new kinds of men.  People are going to achieve impossibilities in goodness, and our inventions in human nature are going to keep up with our other inventions.

CHAPTER VII

IMAGINATION ABOUT THE UNSEEN

The most distinctively modern thing that ever happened was when Benjamin Franklin went out one day and called down lightning from heaven.  Before that, power had always been dug up, or scraped off the ground.  The more power you wanted the more you had to get hold of the ground and dig for it; and the more solid you were, the more heavy, solid things you could get, the more you could pull solid, heavy things round in this world where you wanted them.  Franklin turned to the sky, and turned power on from above, and decided that the real and the solid and the substantial in this world was to be pulled about by the Invisible.

Copernicus had the same idea, of course, when he fared forth into space, and discovered the centre of all power to be in the sun.  It grieved people a good deal to find how much more important the sky was than they were, and their whole little planet with all of them on it.  The idea that that big blue field up there, empty by day and with such crowds of little faint dots in it all night, was the real thing—­the big, final, and important thing—­and that they and their churches and popes and pyramids and nations should just dance about it for millions of years like a mote in a sunbeam, hurt their feelings at first.  But it did them good.  It started them looking Up, and looking the other way for power.

Very soon afterward Columbus enlarged upon the same idea by starting the world toward very far things, on the ground; and he bored through the skylines, a thousand skylines, and spread the nations upon the sea.  Columbus was the typical modern man led by the invisible, the intangible; and on the great waters somewhere between Spain and New York, between the old and the new, Columbus discovered the Future Tense, the centrifugal tense, the tense that sweeps in the unknown, and gathers in, out of space, out