Through evil to good; through sin to a righteousness higher than could have been attained save through sin; through falsehood to the truth; through superstition to religion—this seemed to me the divine evolution discernible in the light that was shed from the cross of Christ. No longer now did it seem impossible or absurd that the Gospel of the Truth might have been temporarily obscured by illusions or superstitions even in the earliest times.
I think it must be now some ten years since I settled down to the belief that the history of Christianity had been the history of profound religious truth, contained in, and preserved by, illusions; an ascent of worship through illusion to the truth. A belief that has been fifteen years in making, and for ten years more has been reviewed, criticized, and finally retained as being historically true and spiritually healthful, you must not call, I think, “a transient phase”. But I forgive you the expression. A dozen pages of autobiography are a sufficient penalty for three offending words.
That children, even at a much younger age than ten, do sometimes exercise their young minds to very ill purpose about these subtle metaphysical questions is probably within the experience of all who know anything about children, and it is amusingly illustrated by the following answer (which I have on the authority of an intimate friend) from a seven-years-old to his mother when blaming him for some misconduct: “Why did you born me then? I didn’t want to be borned. You should have asked me before you borned me.”
You ask me to explain, in detail, what I mean by asserting that the Imagination is the basis of knowledge. “Apparently,” you say, “our knowledge of the world external to ourselves seems to you to spring, not from the sensations as interpreted by the Reason, but (at all events to a large extent) from the sensations as interpreted by the Imagination. If you mean this, I wish you would show how the Imagination thus builds up our knowledge of the world. But I think I must have misunderstood you.”
You have not misunderstood me. I would go even further than the limits of your statement: for I believe that we are largely indebted to the Imagination for our knowledge, not only of the external world, but also of ourselves. However, suppose we first take a simple instance of the knowledge of external things: “This inkstand is hard. How did I come to know that it was hard? How do I know that it is hard now?”