We talk much of Imagination. We talk of the Imagination of Poets, the Imagination of Artists, &c; I am inclined to think that in general we don’t know very exactly what we are talking about . . . Imagination . . . is the Combining Faculty. It brings together things, facts, ideas, conceptions, in new, original, endless, ever varying, Combinations . . . Imagination is the Discovering Faculty, pre-eminently. It is that which penetrates into the unseen worlds around us, the worlds of Science. It is that which feels & discovers what is, the real which we see not, which exists not for our senses.

From ‘Essay on Imagination’,
by Ada, Countess of Lovelace, in 1841