no, and such experiences are not uncommon with persons who converse much
with their own thoughts. Dr. Johnson said that to kick one's foot
against a stone was a sufficient confutation of Berkeley, and poor old
Pyrrho has passed into a proverb because, denying the objectivity of
matter, he was run over by a cart and killed. But all that he affirmed
was that to the soul the cart was no more real than its own imaginative
reproduction of it, and perhaps the shade of the philosopher ran up to
the first of his deriders who crossed the Styx with a triumphant "I told
you so! The cart did not run over _me_, for here I am without a bone
broken."

And, in another sense also, do those poets who deal with human
character, as all the greater do, continually suggest to us the purely
phantasmal nature of life except as it is related to the world of ideas.
For are not their personages more real than most of those in history? Is
not Lear more authentic and permanent than Lord Raglan? Their realm is a
purely spiritual one in which space and time and costume are nothing.
What matters it that Shakespeare puts a seaport in Bohemia, and knew
less geography than Tommy who goes to the district school? He understood
eternal boundaries, such as are laid down on no chart, and are not
defined by such transitory affairs as mountain chains, rivers, and seas.

No great movement of the human mind takes place without the concurrent
beat of those two wings, the imagination and the understanding. It is by
the understanding that we are enabled to make the most of this world,
and to use the collected material of experience in its condensed form of
practical wisdom; and it is the imagination which forever beckons toward
that other world which is always future, and makes us discontented with
this. The one rests upon experience; the other leans forward and listens
after the inexperienced, and shapes the features of that future with