Page:Gilman human-work 1904.pdf/331

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XV

CONSUMPTION (II)

Our minds are so thoroughly accustomed to thinking along false lines in economics that true and natural social processes, when described to them, seem but fantastic dreams.

This is only according to the brain's working habits; it takes time to change it, and we need much patience with ourselves and one another while changing. Fortunately for the age we live in, there has been so much change in so many lines that further progress is easy, compared to what it was a few centuries ago. Fortunately in especial for the country we live in, its national attitude is that of welcome to the new, suspicion of the old.

In the wonderful spread of the great art, Literature, and particularly the branch art, Fiction, as distributed so universally among us by our libraries, our periodicals, and the daily press, we have far more general use of the imagination—our brains will stretch. This faculty of imagination is no mere factor in telling fairy-tales; it is that power of seeing over and under and around and through, of foreseeing, of constructing hypotheses, by which science and invention profit as much as art. Distance, perspective, proportion, these are obtained, in our consideration of facts, by use of the

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