The development of the imagination, upon the power of which both absorption of knowledge and creative capacity depend, is, therefore, a matter of supreme importance.  To this necessity educators will some day open their eyes, and educational systems will some day conform; meantime, it must be done mainly by individual work.  Knowledge, discipline, and technical training of the best sort are accessible on every hand; but the development of the faculty which unites all these in the highest form of activity must be secured mainly by personal effort.  The richest and most accessible material for this highest education is furnished by art; and the form of art within reach of every civilised man, at all times, in all places, is the book.  To these masterpieces, which have been called the books of life, all men may turn with the assurance that as the supreme achievements of the imagination they have the power of awakening, stimulating, and enriching it in the highest degree.  For the genuine reader, who sees in a book what the writer has put there, repeats in a way the process through which the maker of the book passed.  The man who reads the “Iliad” and the “Odyssey” with his heart as well as his intelligence must measurably enter into the life which these poems describe and interpret; he must identify himself for the time with the race whose soul and historic character are revealed in epic form as in a great mirror; he must see life from the Greek point of view, and feel life as the Greek felt it.  He must, in a word, go through the process by which the poems were made, as well as feel, comprehend, and enjoy their final perfection.  In like manner the open-hearted and open-minded reader of the Book of Job cannot rest content with that noble poem in the form which it now possesses; the imaginative impulse which even the casual reading of the poem liberates in him sends him behind the finished product to the life of which it was the immortal fruit; he enters into the groping thought of an age which has perished out of all other remembrance; he deals with a problem which is as old as man from the standpoint of men who have left no other record of themselves.  In proportion to the depth of his feeling and the vitality of his imagination he must saturate himself with the rich life of thought, conviction, and emotion, of struggle and aspiration, out of which the greatest of the poems of nature took its rise.  He must, in a word, receive into himself the living material upon which the unknown poet worked.  In such a process the imagination is evoked in full and free play; it insensibly reconstructs a life gone out of knowledge; selects, harmonises, unifies, and in a measure creates.  It illuminates and unifies knowledge, divines the wide relations of thought, and discerns its place in organic connection with the world which gave it birth.