The use of traveling is to regulate imagination by reality, and instead of thinking how things may be, to see them as they are.

Samuel Johnson voiced this sentiment in the mid-18th century, when travel writing and the “Grand Tour” were fashionable among Britain’s educated classes. Johnson himself was skeptical of travel as mere diversion or status display, and he often stressed moral and intellectual discipline over novelty. The remark is preserved in James Boswell’s record of Johnson’s conversation, where Johnson frames travel as a corrective to fanciful expectations and secondhand notions. In an era when many people formed their views of foreign places from books, hearsay, or romanticized accounts, Johnson presents travel’s best justification as the sober testing of imagination against direct experience.

Johnson argues that travel’s real value is epistemic: it checks the mind’s tendency to invent, idealize, or catastrophize by confronting it with what actually exists. “Regulate imagination by reality” implies not the suppression of imagination, but its calibration—bringing hopes, fears, and theories into proportion with observed facts. The second clause contrasts speculative thinking (“how things may be”) with empirical seeing (“as they are”), echoing Johnson’s broader preference for practical wisdom over airy abstraction. The line also carries a moral undertone: clear sight is a discipline, and travel, properly used, can train humility by showing the world’s complexity and resisting self-serving fantasies.