i
Imagination depends mainly upon memory, but there is a small percentage
of creation of something out of nothing with it. We can invent a trifle
more than can be got at by mere combination of remembered things.
ii
When we are impressed by a few only, or perhaps only one of a number of
ideas which are bonded pleasantly together, there is hope; when we see a
good many there is expectation; when we have had so many presented to us
that we have expected confidently and the remaining ideas have not turned
up, there is disappointment. So the sailor says in the play:
“Here are my arms, here is my manly bosom, but where’s my Mary?”
iii
What tricks imagination plays! Thus, if we expect a person in the street
we transform a dozen impossible people into him while they are still too
far off to be seen distinctly; and when we expect to hear a footstep on
the stairs—as, we will say, the postman’s—we hear footsteps in every
sound. Imagination will make us see a billiard hall as likely to travel
farther than it will travel, if we hope that it will do so. It will make
us think we feel a train begin to move as soon as the guard has said “All
right,” though the train has not yet begun to move if another train
alongside begins to move exactly at this juncture, there is no man who
will not be deceived. And we omit as much as we insert. We often do not
notice that a man has grown a beard.
iv
I read once of a man who was cured of a dangerous illness by eating his
doctor’s prescription which he understood was the medicine itself. So
William Sefton Moorhouse [in New Zealand] imagined he was being converted
to Christianity by reading Burton’s _Anatomy of Melancholy_, which he had
got by mistake for Butler’s _Analogy_, on the recommendation of a friend.
But it puzzled him a good deal.
v
At Ivy Hatch, while we were getting our beer in the inner parlour, there
was a confused mêlée of voices in the bar, amid which I distinguished a
voice saying:
“Imagination will do any bloody thing almost.”
I was writing _Life and Habit_ at the time and was much tempted to put
this passage in. Nothing truer has ever been said about imagination.
Then the voice was heard addressing the barman and saying:
“I suppose you wouldn’t trust me with a quart of beer, would you?”