Building castles in the air has always been one of the favourite amusements of mankind. To it we owe much, not only of the zest of life, but also of motive power for overcoming difficulties and reaching out towards new possibilities. Yet all literature, and tradition that is earlier than any written literature, is full of a deep note of warning; over and over again we see in the dim past the shadow of a tower that was built in vain, of walls that were piled too high and toppled into ruin, of crests that tapped the thunder-clouds and drew down lightning to their own destruction. Evidently man has seen danger in his own desire! The castle must be built with wisdom as well as with industry and boldness if it is to escape disaster and to become a storehouse, a safe defence or a vantage-ground for surveying earth and sky.

There is one obvious precaution we should observe in building our castles, and that is to realise that all which we imagine and think about tends sooner or later to externalise itself and pass into action. Every idea tends to glide into an ideal. Nearly all thinkers have recognised this, and have seen that morality lies much farther back than action, farther back than conscious will. Banquo had dreams of ambition, as had Macbeth, but they dealt differently with them; while Macbeth allowed his visions to lead him on to treachery and murder, Banquo prayed against the temptations that came to him in sleep. To most of us imagination, sleeping or waking, comes in less dramatic form, but we should all think more sanely and act more wisely if we interposed a definite revision by the conscious mind and will of all our plans and ideals between their (perhaps quite automatic) formation in our imagination and their translation into fact. Slack muscle should go with the daydream or picture of the future; we should not strike or clench or lift until we have decided that the action is right and just and wise. The girl who counted her chickens and broke the eggs is a true enough example: every doctor and coroner knows many instances of results far more tragic.

But sometimes the vision has nothing in it but what is pure and good and noble. Are there any dangers even here?

There is this danger always, that we find the picture so lovely and so satisfying that we cannot summon up courage and energy to turn away from it towards the serious work which it suggests. The castle in the air is radiant and tall, but it is generally meant as a model for a tougher building made out of common earth, by toil and pain, amidst mud and dust. It is so much easier, as Sordello knew, to imagine than to do. Actual circumstances, real life, other people all this that lies round us is sterner stuff than our easily moulded material of dreams. Who has not at some time or other lain sleepily in bed of a morning and gone through in thought the processes of getting up, until a louder call or an alarum bell has awakened the realisation that the task is not yet begun? Who has not been tempted to shirk practice of some sort in thinking of a prize? Who has not sometimes built expectation higher and higher until his demands of fate have become so great that, in despair of making good, he has let the whole plan slip away into the valley of forgotten dreams?

These dangers, the almost involuntary carrying out of unworthy aims that have been cherished in thought and the loss of vigour for real achievement, due to too easy an indulgence in blameless aspiration, are fairly obvious and have long been recognised.

There is another that has been seen from time to time and occasionally expressed.[16] We have seen that too loose a dream-world may make the world in which we live seem dull and ordinary. But is not the converse at least as often true? If our thought-world is too narrow, too selfish or too weak, all our ordinary work, sound and compact though it may be, is stultified, misdirected, often wasted. We all know how in the industrial world something more than industry is needed; in the emotional world something more than a clumsy and unapprehending goodwill. We need a certain insight to turn these solid qualities of labour and feeling to the best account. “A man's reach should exceed his grasp,” a great poet tells us, and even the birds or beavers do not go on quite blindly with their building, but, when effort on effort has been destroyed by wind and water or man's interference, they at last accommodate their instinct to circumstances so as to give themselves a better chance of fulfilling their deeper purpose. In many ways we have hardly outgrown the beaver stage: wars, accidents, disease, disputes—how many times must we try over again the same path which has led us before into trouble and disaster before we put our imagination seriously to work on the problem and try to find some more complete solution?

Of all the dangers of the use of the imagination, perhaps the greatest of all is the neglect to use it, the denial of it and its consequent starvation.

E.M. Cobham.

[16] Mrs Book sees an allusion to this danger, as well as to the first, in the warnings against covetousness in the Tenth Commandment.