Nearly all our imaginations are visual in character; great composers
may imagine the orchestration of the masterpiece they are composing--so
vividly, at times, that this amounts to an auditory hallucination.
But most of us are more or less limited to _visual_ imaginings; we
“build air-castles in Spain,” or imagine ourselves in various scenes or
situations, which are seen by the “mind’s eye.” The explanation usually
put forward to explain this is that “sensations, once experienced,
modify the nervous organism, so that copies of them arise again in the
mind after the original outward stimulus is gone.” No such mental copy,
of course, can arise in the mind, of any sensation which has never been
directly excited from without, on this theory.
This power of “visualization” differs greatly in different individuals;
some men are good, others bad visualizers. Images of sounds, muscular
sensations, touch, etc., may also be reconstructed. These again may be
so vivid as to amount to actual hallucinations.
Imagination consists in the power of the mind to build-up mental
pictures, and project them into the _future_, just as memory-images are
projected into the _past_--into our life-experience. Imagination is
that power of the mind which seems, in one sense, to pierce the veil.
While such imaginings are, as a rule, merely day-dreams, never coming
true, it is also a fact that all great works must be thought of or
imagined, in some sense, before they are executed, or come into being
on the material plane. Someone must have “imagined” the Pyramids before
they were built. Rightly used, then, imagination is a very valuable
asset, which should be cherished and utilized--just as it can become
destructive, if abused. It had indeed been said that a sense of humor
and imagination are the two things which distinguish us more than
anything else from the brutes.
Use your imagination, therefore, only keep it well in leash--like the
thoroughbred horse which it is!