by Orison Swett Marden

Once when Emerson was in the company of men of affairs, who had been discussing railroads, stocks, and other business matters for some time, he said, “Gentlemen, now let us discuss real things for a while.”

Emerson was called “the dreamer of dreams,” because he had the prophetic vision that saw the world to be, the higher civilization to come. Tens of thousands of men and women stand today where he then stood almost alone.

Edison is a dreamer because he sees people half a century hence using and enjoying inventions, discoveries, and facilities which make the most advanced utilities of today seem very antiquated. His mind’s eye sees as curiosities in museums, fifty years hence, those mechanisms and devices which now seem so marvelous to us. Dreamers in this sense are true prophets. They see the civilization that will be, long before it arrives.

As it was the dreamers of ’49 who built the old San Francisco and made it the greatest port on the Western coast; so after the recent great earthquake and fire, when the city lay in ashes and three hundred thousand people were homeless, it was the dreamers of today who saw the new city in the ashes where others saw only desolation, and who, with indomitable grit, and the unconquerable American will that characterized the pioneers of a half-century before, began to plan a restored city greater and grander than the old. It was in dreams that the projectors of the great transcontinental railroads first saw teeming cities and vast business enterprises where the more “practical” men, without imagination, saw only the great American desert, vast alkali plains, sage grass, and impassable mountains. The dreams of men like Collis P. Huntington and Leland Stanford bound together the East and the West with bands of steel, made the two oceans neighbors, reclaimed the desert, and built cities where before only desolation reigned.

It was the persistency and grit of dreamers that triumphed over the congressmen without imagination who advised importing dromedaries to carry the mails across the great American desert; because they said it was ridiculous, a foolish waste of money, to build a railroad to the Pacific Ocean, as there was nothing there to support a population.

It was such dreamers as those who saw the great metropolis of Chicago in a straggling Indian village; who saw Omaha, Kansas City, Denver, Salt Lake City, Los Angeles, and San Francisco many years before they arrived, that made their existence possible.

It was such dreamers as Marshall Field, Joseph Leiter, and Potter Palmer, who saw in the ashes of the burned Chicago a new and glorified city, infinitely greater and grander than the old.

Take the dreamers out of the world’s history, and who would care to read it? Our dreamers! They are the advance guard of humanity; the toilers who, with bent back and sweating brow, cut smooth roads over which man marches forward from generation to generation.

Most of the things which make life worth living, which have emancipated man from drudgery and lifted him above commonness and ugliness—the great amenities of life—we owe to our dreamers.

The present is but the sum total of the dreams of the ages that have gone before,— the dreams of the past made real. Our great ocean liners, our marvelous tunnels, our magnificent bridges, our schools, our universities, our hospitals, our libraries, our cosmopolitan cities, with their vast facilities, comforts, and treasures of art, are all the result of somebody’s dreams.

We hear a great deal of talk about the impracticality of dreamers, of people whose heads are among the stars while their feet are on the earth; but where would civilization be today but for the dreamers? We should still be riding in the stagecoach or tramping across continents. We should still cross the ocean in sailing ships, and our letters would be carried across continents by the pony express.

“It cannot be done,” cries the man without imagination. “It can be done, it shall be done,” cries the dreamer; and he persists in his dreams through all sorts of privations, even to the point of starvation, if necessary, until his visions, his inventions, his discoveries, his ideas for the betterment of the race, are made practical realities.

What a picture the dreamer Columbus presented as he went about exposed to continual scoffs and indignities, characterized as an adventurer, the very children taught to regard him as a madman and pointing to their foreheads as he passed! He dreamed of a world beyond the seas, and, in spite of unspeakable obstacles, his vision became a glorious reality.

It was the men who, a quarter of a century ahead of their contemporaries, saw the marvelous Hoe press in the hand-press that made modern journalism possible. Without these dreamers our printing would still be done by hand. It was the men who were denounced as visionaries who practically annihilated space, and enabled us to converse and transact business with people thousands of miles away as though they were in the same building with us.

The very practical people tell us that the imagination is all well enough in artists, musicians, and poets, but that it has little place in the great world of realities. Yet all leaders of men have been dreamers. Our great captains of industry, our merchant princes, have had powerful, prophetic imaginations. They had faith in the vast commercial possibilities of our people. If it had not been for our dreamers, the American population would still be hugging the Atlantic coast.

The most practical people in the world are those who can look far into the future and see the civilization yet to be; who can see the coming man emancipated from the narrowing, hampering fetters, limitations, and superstitions of the present day; who have the ability to foresee things to come with the power to make them realities. The dreamers have ever been those who have achieved the seemingly impossible.

Our public parks, our art galleries, our great institutions are dotted with monuments and statues which the world has built to its dreamers,—those who saw visions of better things, better days for the human race.

What horrible experiences men and women have gone through in prisons and dungeons for their dreams; dreams which were destined to lift the world from savagery and emancipate man from drudgery.

The very dreams for which Galileo and other great scientists were imprisoned and persecuted were recognized as science only a few generations later. Galileo’s dream gave us a new heaven and a new earth. The dreams of Confucius, of Buddha, of Socrates, have become realities in millions of human lives. Christ Himself was denounced as a dreamer, but His whole life was a prophecy, a dream of the coming man, the coming civilization. He saw beyond the burlesque of the man God intended, beyond the deformed, weak, deficient, imperfect man heredity had made, to the perfect man, the ideal man, the image of divinity.

Our visions do not mock us. They are evidences of what is to be, the fore-glimpses of possible realities. The castle in the air always precedes the castle on the earth.

George Stephenson, the poor miner, dreamed of a locomotive engine that would revolutionize the traffic of the world. While working in the coal pits for sixpence a day, or patching the clothes and mending the boots of his fellow-workmen to earn a little money to attend a night school, and at the same time supporting his blind father, he continued to dream. People called him crazy. “His roaring engine will set the houses on fire with its sparks,” everybody cried. “Smoke will pollute the air”; “carriage makers and coachmen will starve for want of work.” See this dreamer in the House of Commons, when members of Parliament were cross-questioning him. “What,” said one member, “can be more palpably absurd and ridiculous than the prospect held out of locomotives traveling twice as fast as horses? We should as soon expect the people of Woolwich to suffer themselves to be fired off upon one of Congreve’s rockets, as to trust themselves to the mercy of such a machine, going at such a rate. We trust that Parliament will, in all the railways it may grant, limit the speed to eight or nine miles an hour, which is as great as can be ventured upon.” But, in spite of calumny, ridicule, and opposition, this “crazy visionary” toiled on for fifteen years for the realization of his vision.

On the fourth of August, 1907, New York celebrated the centennial of the dream of Robert Fulton. See the crowd of curious scoffers at the wharves of the Hudson River at noon on Friday, August 4, 1807, to witness the results of what they thought the most ridiculous idea which ever entered a human brain; to witness what they believed would be a most humiliating failure of the dreams of a “crank” who proposed to take a party of people up the river to Albany in a steam vessel named the “Clermont”! “Did anybody ever hear of such an absurd idea as navigating against the current of the Hudson River without sail?” scornfully said the scoffing wiseacres. Many of them thought that the man who had fooled away his time and money on the “Clermont” was little better than an idiot, and that he ought to be in an insane asylum. But the “Clermont” did sail up the Hudson, and Fulton was hailed as a benefactor of the human race.

What does the world not owe to Morse, who gave it its first telegraph? When the inventor asked for an appropriation of a few thousand dollars for the first experimental line from Washington to Baltimore, he was sneered at by congressmen. After discouragements which would have disheartened most men, this experimental line was completed, and some congressmen were waiting for the message which they did not believe would ever come, when one of them asked the inventor how large a package he expected to be able to send over the wire. But very quickly the message did come, and derision was changed to praise.

The dream of Cyrus W. Field, which tied two continents together by the ocean cable, was denounced as worse than folly. How long would it take to get the world’s day-by-day news but for such dreamers as Field?

When William Murdock, at the close of the eighteenth century, dreamed of lighting London by means of coal gas conveyed to buildings in pipes, even Sir Humphry Davy sneeringly asked, “Do you intend taking the dome of St. Paul’s for a gasometer?” Sir Walter Scott, too, ridiculed the idea of lighting London by “smoke,” but he lived to use this same smoke-dream to light his castle at Abbottsford. “What!” said the wise scientists, “a light without a wick? Impossible!”

How people laughed at the dreamer, Charles Goodyear, who struggled with hardships for eleven long years while trying to make india-rubber of practical use! See him in prison for debt, still dreaming, while pawning his clothes and his wife’s jewelry to get a little money to keep his children from starving! Note his sublime courage and devotion to his vision even when without money to bury a dead child; while his five other children were near starvation, and his neighbors were denouncing him as insane!

Women called Elias Howe a fool and “crank” and condemned him for neglecting his family to dream of a machine which has proved a blessing to millions of their sex.

The great masters are always idealists, seers of visions. The sculptor is a dreamer who sees the statue in the rough block before he strikes a blow with his chisel. The artist sees a vision of the finished painting in all its perfection and beauty of coloring and form before he touches a brush to the canvas.

Every palace, every beautiful structure, is first the dream of the architect. It had no previous existence in reality. The building came out of his ideal before it was made real. Sir Christopher Wren saw Saint Paul’s Cathedral in all its magnificent beauty before the foundations were laid. It was his dream which revolutionized the architecture of London.

It was the dreaming Baron Haussmann who made Paris the most beautiful city in the world.

Think what we owe the beauty dreamers for making our homes and our parks so attractive! Yet there are thousands of practical men in New York today who, if they could have their way, would cut Central Park up into lots and cover it with business blocks.

The achievements of every successful man are but the realized visions of his youth, his dreams of bettering his condition, of enlarging his power.

Our homes are the dreams that began with lovers and their efforts to better their condition; the dreams of those who once lived in huts and in log cabins.

The modern luxurious railway train is the dream of those who rode in the old stagecoach.

Not more than a dozen years ago the horseless carriage, the manufacture of which now promises to make one of the largest businesses in the world, was considered by most people in the same light as is the airship today. But there has recently been an exhibition of these “dreams” in Madison Square Garden, New York, on a scale so vast in the suggestiveness of its possibilities as to stagger credulity.

Half a dozen years since, this invention was looked upon as a mere toy, a fad for a few millionaires. Twelve years ago [from 1908] there was not a single factory in America making cars for the market. Fourteen years ago [from 1908] there were only five horseless vehicles in this country, and they had been imported at extravagant prices. Today there are over a hundred thousand in actual use. Instead of being a toy for millionaires, the automobile is now being used in place of horses by thousands of people with ordinary incomes.

This dream is already helping us to solve the problem of crowded streets. It is proving a great educator, as well as a health giver, by tempting people into the country. The average man will ultimately, through its full realization, practically travel in his own private car. In. fact this dream is becoming one of the greatest joys and blessings that has ever come to humanity.

It was the wonderful dream in steel of Carnegie, Schwab, and their associates, together with that of the elevator creator, that made the modern city with its skyscrapers possible.

What do we not owe to our poet dreamers, who like Shakespeare, have taught us to see the uncommon in the common, the extraordinary in the ordinary?

The divinest heritage of man is the capacity to dream. It matters not how much we have to suffer today, if we believe there is a better tomorrow. Even “stone walls do not a prison make” to those who can dream.

Who would rob the poor of this dreaming faculty, that takes the drudgery out of their dry, dreary occupations? Who would deprive them of the luxuries which they enjoy in their dreams of a better and brighter future, of a fuller education, of more comforts for those dear to them.

There is no medicine like hope, no incentive so great and no tonic so powerful as expectation of something better tomorrow.

Dreaming is especially characteristic of the typical American. No matter how poor, or what his misfortune, he is confident, self-reliant, even defiant at fate, because he believes better days are coming. The clerk can live in a store of his own which his imagination builds. The poorest factory girl dreams of a beautiful home of her own. The humblest dream of power.

The ability to lift oneself instantly out of all perplexities, trials, troubles, and discordant environment, into an atmosphere of harmony and beauty and truth, is beyond price. How many of us would have heart enough, hope enough, and courage enough, to continue the struggle of life with enthusiasm if our power of dreaming were taken away from us?

It is this dreaming, this hoping, this constant expectancy of better things to come, that keeps up our courage, lightens our burdens, and makes clear the way.

I know a lady who has gone through the most trying and heartrending experiences for many years, and yet everybody who knows her marvels at her sweetness of temper, her balance of mind, and beauty of character. She says that she owes everything to her ability to dream; that she can at will lift herself out of the most discordant and trying conditions into a calm of absolute harmony and beauty, and come back to her work with a freshened mind and invigorated body.

The dreaming faculty, like every other faculty, may be abused. A great many people do nothing but dream. They spend all their energies in building air castles which they never try to make real; they live in an unnatural, delusive, theoretical atmosphere until the faculties become paralyzed from inaction.

It is a splendid thing to dream when you have the grit and tenacity of purpose and the resolution to match your dreams with realities, but dreaming without effort, wishing without putting forth exertion to realize the wish, undermines the character. It is only practical dreaming that counts,—dreaming coupled with hard work and persistent endeavor.

Just in proportion as we make our dreams realities, shall we become strong and effective. Dreams that are realized become an inspiration for new endeavor. It is in the power to make the dream good that we find the hope of this world.

Dreaming and making good, this was what John Harvard did when with his few hundred dollars he made Harvard College possible. The founding of Yale College with a handful of books was but a dream made good.

President Roosevelt owes everything to his dream of better conditions for humanity, of higher ideals; his dream of a larger, finer type of manhood; of better government, of a finer citizenship, of a larger and cleaner manhood and womanhood.

The child lives in dreamland. It creates a world of its own, and plays with the castles it builds. It traces pictures which are very real to it; it enjoys that which was never on sea or land, but which has a powerful influence in shaping its future life and character.

Do not stop dreaming. Encourage your visions and believe in them. Cherish your dreams and try to make them real. This thing in us that aspires, that bids us to look up, that beckons us higher, is the God part of ourselves.

Aspiration is the hand that points us to the road that runs heavenward. As your vision is, so will your life be. Your better dream is the prophecy of what your life may be, ought to be.

The great thing is to try to fashion the life after the pattern shown us in the moment of our highest inspiration; to make our highest moment permanent.

We are all conscious that the best we do is but a sorry apology for what we ought to do, might do. The average man is but a burlesque of the sublime man he was intended to be. We certainly were made for something larger, grander, and more beautiful than we are. We have a feeling that what we are is out of keeping with—does not fit—the larger, greater life-plan which the Creator patterned for us; that it is mean, sordid, stingy, and pinched compared with the pattern of that divine man shown us in the moment of our highest vision.

It is this creative power of the imagination, these dreams of the dreamers made good, that will ultimately raise man to his highest power; that will break down the barriers of caste, race, and creed, and make real the poet’s vision of the Parliament of man, the Federation of the world.

“The Golden Age lies onward, not behind.
The pathway through the past has led us up:
The pathway through the future will lead on,
And higher.”

Excerpt from He Can Who Thinks He Can