"The use of travelling is to regulate imagination by reality, and instead of thinking how things may be, to see them as they are"
About this Quote
Travel, for Samuel Johnson, is less about discovery than discipline. The sentence snaps with the moral confidence of an 18th-century man who distrusted airy speculation and prized the correcting force of lived experience. “Regulate imagination by reality” casts the mind as something productive but unruly: imagination generates possibilities, vanity, fear, and fantasy; reality is the bracing instrument that brings those impulses back into proportion. Johnson’s verb choice matters. “Regulate” doesn’t mean kill imagination; it means meter it, like a clock or a constitution. He’s arguing for calibration, not cynicism.
The subtext is a rebuke to armchair cosmopolitanism and secondhand certainty. In Johnson’s Britain, “how things may be” was the territory of travel literature, salon chatter, and political mythmaking about foreign places. Empires were expanding, stereotypes were convenient, and “knowledge” often arrived prepackaged as rumor. Johnson’s line insists on a kind of epistemic humility: you don’t get to hold strong opinions about the world if you haven’t submitted them to the friction of observation.
There’s also an ethical undertone. Seeing “things as they are” suggests attention to texture: the daily logistics, the inequalities, the customs that don’t flatter the visitor’s expectations. Johnson is warning that the imagination, uncorrected, tends to make the world into a stage for the self. Travel, at its best, forces the self to shrink to scale.
In context, it reads like an early argument for what we’d now call reality-checking your worldview: go, look, and let the facts embarrass your fantasies.
The subtext is a rebuke to armchair cosmopolitanism and secondhand certainty. In Johnson’s Britain, “how things may be” was the territory of travel literature, salon chatter, and political mythmaking about foreign places. Empires were expanding, stereotypes were convenient, and “knowledge” often arrived prepackaged as rumor. Johnson’s line insists on a kind of epistemic humility: you don’t get to hold strong opinions about the world if you haven’t submitted them to the friction of observation.
There’s also an ethical undertone. Seeing “things as they are” suggests attention to texture: the daily logistics, the inequalities, the customs that don’t flatter the visitor’s expectations. Johnson is warning that the imagination, uncorrected, tends to make the world into a stage for the self. Travel, at its best, forces the self to shrink to scale.
In context, it reads like an early argument for what we’d now call reality-checking your worldview: go, look, and let the facts embarrass your fantasies.
Quote Details
| Topic | Travel |
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