“What is now proved was once, only imagin'd.”William Blake · Căsătoria Cerului cu Infernul · 1793 · Proverbele Infernului
Every proven fact began as a fantasy someone refused to abandon.
Blake shows that imagination is not the opposite of knowledge but its starting point. Every proven fact first existed as a hypothesis deemed absurd. The mechanism is historical: someone imagines an impossibility, tests it, and imagination converts into proof. Travel to the Moon was fiction before it was engineering. To scorn imagination is to scorn the source of every future fact.
Why it matters Useful when new ideas are dismissed as fanciful, whether in science or in personal plans deemed unrealistic.