Now, sympathy in this sense is the imagination touched with
feeling; it is the imagination bringing thought and emotion into vital
relation. In the process of culture, therefore, the imagination plays
a great part; for culture, it cannot too often be said, is knowledge,
observation, and experience incorporate into personality and become
part of the very nature of the individual. The man of culture is
pre-eminently a man of imagination; lacking this quality, he may
become learned by force of industry, or a scholar by virtue of a
trained intelligence, but the ripeness, the balance, the peculiar
richness of fibre which characterise the man of culture will be denied
him. The man of culture, it is true, is not always a man of creative
power; but he is never devoid of that kind of creative quality which
transforms everything he receives into something personal and
individual. And the more deeply one studies the work of the great
artists, the more distinctly does he see the immense place which
culture in the vital, as contrasted with the academic, sense held in
their lives, and the great part it played in their productive
activity.
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