.
Alexander Ralston was born in Scotland
in 1771. In Britain he was engineer working for the Baron of Roslin
on his estate before immigrating to the United States after the American Revolution
. An assistant to the French architect Pierre L'Enfant in 1791, Ralston helped L'Enfant layout the city plan for Washington, DC. Ralston came to Indiana
sometime before 1815, leaving the east partly because of his involvement with Aaron Burr
and the Burr conspiracy
.
Nothing is more dangerous to reason than the flights of the imagination and nothing has been the occasion of more mistakes among philosophers. Men of bright fancies may in this respect be compared to those angels whom the scripture represents as covering their eyes with their wings.
Philosophy makes progress not by becoming more rigorous but by becoming more imaginative.
The conception of the necessary unit of all that is resolves itself into the poverty of the imagination, and a freer logic emancipates us from the straitwaistcoated benevolent institution, which idealism palms off as the totality of being.
The true function of logic,... as applied to matters of experience,... is analytic rather than constructive; taken a priori, it shows the possibility of hitherto unsuspected alternatives more often than the impossibility of alternatives which seemed prima facie possible. Thus, while it liberates imagination as to what the world may be, it refuses to legislate as to what the world is.
Science does not know its debt to imagination.
Cowardice, as distinguished from panic, is almost always simply a lack of ability to suspend the functioning of the imagination.
There is no life I knowthat compares to pure imaginationLiving there you'll be freeif you truly wish to be
Impossibility is only the figment of an insufficient imagination.