IMAGINATION
Everyone desires to have a good imagination, yet not all would agree as
to what constitutes a good imagination. If I were to ask a group of you
whether you have good imaginations, many of you would probably at once
fall to considering whether you are capable of taking wild flights into
impossible realms of thought and evolving unrealities out of airy
nothings. You would compare yourself with great imaginative writers,
such as Stevenson, Poe, De Quincey, and judge your power of imagination
by your ability to produce such tales as made them famous.
1. THE PLACE OF IMAGINATION IN MENTAL ECONOMY
But such a measure for the imagination as that just stated is far too
narrow. A good imagination, like a good memory, is the one which serves
its owner best. If DeQuincey and Poe and Stevenson and Bulwer found the
type which led them into such dizzy flights the best for their
particular purpose, well and good; but that is not saying that their
type is the best for you, or that you may not rank as high in some other
field of imaginative power as they in theirs. While you may lack in
their particular type of imagination, they may have been short in the
type which will one day make you famous. The artisan, the architect, the
merchant, the artist, the farmer, the teacher, the professional
man--all need imagination in their vocations not less than the writers
need it in theirs, but each needs a specialized kind adapted to the
particular work which he has to do.
PRACTICAL NATURE OF IMAGINATION.--Imagination is not a process of
thought which must deal chiefly with unrealities and impossibilities,
and which has for its chief end our amusement when we have nothing
better to do than to follow its wanderings. It is, rather, a
commonplace, necessary process which illumines the way for our everyday
thinking and acting--a process without which we think and act by
haphazard chance or blind imitation. It is the process by which the
images from our past experiences are marshaled, and made to serve our
present. Imagination looks into the future and constructs our patterns
and lays our plans. It sets up our ideals and pictures us in the acts of
achieving them. It enables us to live our joys and our sorrows, our
victories and our defeats before we reach them. It looks into the past
and allows us to live with the kings and seers of old, or it goes back
to the beginning and we see things in the process of the making. It
comes into our present and plays a part in every act from the simplest
to the most complex. It is to the mental stream what the light is to the
traveler who carries it as he passes through the darkness, while it
casts its beams in all directions around him, lighting up what otherwise
would be intolerable gloom.
IMAGINATION IN THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY, LITERATURE, AND ART.--Let
us see some of the most common uses of the imagination. Suppose I
describe to you the battle of the Marne. Unless you can take the images
which my words suggest and build them into struggling, shouting,
bleeding soldiers; into forts and entanglements and breastworks; into
roaring cannon and whistling bullet and screaming shell--unless you can
take all these separate images and out of them get one great unified
complex, then my description will be to you only so many words largely
without content, and you will lack the power to comprehend the
historical event in any complete way. Unless you can read the poem, and
out of the images suggested by the words reconstruct the picture which
was in the mind of the author as he wrote "The Village Blacksmith" or
"Snowbound," the significance will have dropped out, and the throbbing
scenes of life and action become only so many dead words, like the shell
of the chrysalis after the butterfly has left its shroud. Without the
power of imagination, the history of Washington's winter at Valley Forge
becomes a mere formal recital, and you can never get a view of the
snow-covered tents, the wind-swept landscape, the tracks in the snow
marked by the telltale drops of blood, or the form of the heartbroken
commander as he kneels in the silent wood to pray for his army. Without
the power to construct this picture as you read, you may commit the
words, and be able to recite them, and to pass examination upon them,
but the living reality of it will forever escape you.
Your power of imagination determines your ability to interpret literature
of all kinds; for the interpretation of literature is nothing, after
all, but the reconstruction on our part of the pictures with their
meanings which were in the mind of the writer as he penned the words,
and the experiencing of the emotions which moved him as he wrote. Small
use indeed to read the history of the centuries unless we can see in it
living, acting people, and real events occurring in actual environments.
Small use to read the world's great books unless their characters are
to us real men and women--our brothers and sisters, interpreted to us by
the master minds of the ages. Anything less than this, and we are no
longer dealing with literature, but with words--like musical sounds
which deal with no theme, or like picture frames in which no picture has
been set. Nor is the case different in listening to a speaker. His words
are to you only so many sensations of sounds of such and such pitches
and intensities and quality, unless your mind keeps pace with his and
continually builds the pictures which fill his thought as he speaks.
Lacking imagination, the sculptures of Michael Angelo and the pictures
of Raphael are to you so many pieces of curiously shaped marble and
ingeniously colored canvas. What the sculptor and the painter have
placed before you must suggest to you images and thoughts from your own
experience, to fill out and make alive the marble and the canvas, else
to you they are dead.
IMAGINATION AND SCIENCE.--Nor is imagination less necessary in other
lines of study. Without this power of building living, moving pictures
out of images, there is small use to study science beyond what is
immediately present to our senses; for some of the most fundamental laws
of science rest upon conceptions which can be grasped only as we have
the power of imagination. The student who cannot get a picture of the
molecules of matter, infinitely close to each other and yet never
touching, all in vibratory motion, yet each within its own orbit, each a
complete unit in itself, yet capable of still further division into
smaller particles,--the student who cannot see all this in a clear
visual image can never at best have more than a most hazy notion of the
theory of matter. And this means, finally, that the explanations of
light and heat and sound, and much besides, will be to him largely a
jumble of words which linger in his memory, perchance, but which never
vitally become a possession of his mind.
So with the world of the telescope. You may have at your disposal all
the magnificent lenses and the accurate machinery owned by modern
observatories; but if you have not within yourself the power to build
what these reveal to you, and what the books tell you, into the solar
system and still larger systems, you can never study astronomy except in
a blind and piecemeal sort of way, and all the planets and satellites
and suns will never for you form themselves into a system, no matter
what the books may say about it.
EVERYDAY USES OF IMAGINATION.--But we may consider a still more
practical phase of imagination, or at least one which has more to do
with the humdrum daily life of most of us. Suppose you go to your
milliner and tell her how you want your spring hat shaped and trimmed.
And suppose you have never been able to see this hat _in toto_ in your
mind, so as to get an idea of how it will look when completed, but have
only a general notion, because you like red velvet, white plumes, and a
turned-up rim, that this combination will look well together. Suppose
you have never been able to see how you would look in this particular
hat with your hair done in this or that way. If you are in this helpless
state shall you not have to depend finally on the taste of the milliner,
or accept the "model," and so fail to reveal any taste or individuality
on your own part?
How many times have you been disappointed in some article of dress,
because when you planned it you were unable to see it all at once so as
to get the full effect; or else you could not see yourself in it, and so
be able to judge whether it suited you! How many homes have in them
draperies and rugs and wall paper and furniture which are in constant
quarrel because someone could not see before they were assembled that
they were never intended to keep company! How many people who plan their
own houses, would build them just the same again after seeing them
completed? The man who can see a building complete before a brick has
been laid or a timber put in place, who can see it not only in its
details one by one as he runs them over in his mind, but can see the
building in its entirety, is the only one who is safe to plan the
structure. And this is the man who is drawing a large salary as an
architect, for imaginations of this kind are in demand. Only the one who
can see in his "mind's eye," before it is begun, the thing he would
create, is capable to plan its construction. And who will say that
ability to work with images of these kinds is not of just as high a type
as that which results in the construction of plots upon which stories
are built!
THE BUILDING OF IDEALS AND PLANS.--Nor is the part of imagination less
marked in the formation of our life's ideals and plans. Everyone who is
not living blindly and aimlessly must have some ideal, some pattern, by
which to square his life and guide his actions. At some time in our life
I am sure that each of us has selected the person who filled most nearly
our notion of what we should like to become, and measured ourselves by
this pattern. But there comes a time when we must idealize even the most
perfect individual; when we invest the character with attributes which
we have selected from some other person, and thus worship at a shrine
which is partly real and partly ideal.
As time goes on, we drop out more and more of the strictly individual
element, adding correspondingly more of the ideal, until our pattern is
largely a construction of our own imagination, having in it the best we
have been able to glean from the many characters we have known. How
large a part these ever-changing ideals play in our lives we shall never
know, but certainly the part is not an insignificant one. And happy the
youth who is able to look into the future and see himself approximating
some worthy ideal. He has caught a vision which will never allow him to
lag or falter in the pursuit of the flying goal which points the
direction of his efforts.
IMAGINATION AND CONDUCT.--Another great field for imagination is with
reference to conduct and our relations with others. Over and over again
the thoughtless person has to say, "I am sorry; I did not think." The
"did not think" simply means that he failed to realize through his
imagination what would be the consequences of his rash or unkind words.
He would not be unkind, but he did not imagine how the other would feel;
he did not put himself in the other's place. Likewise with reference to
the effects of our conduct on ourselves. What youth, taking his first
drink of liquor, would continue if he could see a clear picture of
himself in the gutter with bloated face and bloodshot eyes a decade
hence? Or what boy, slyly smoking one of his early cigarettes, would
proceed if he could see his haggard face and nerveless hand a few years
farther along? What spendthrift would throw away his money on vanities
could he vividly see himself in penury and want in old age? What
prodigal anywhere who, if he could take a good look at himself
sin-stained and broken as he returns to his "father's house" after the
years of debauchery in the "far country" would not hesitate long before
he entered upon his downward career?
IMAGINATION AND THINKING.--We have already considered the use of
imagination in interpreting the thoughts, feelings and handiwork of
others. Let us now look a little more closely into the part it plays in
our own thinking. Suppose that, instead of reading a poem, we are
writing one; instead of listening to a description of a battle, we are
describing it; instead of looking at the picture, we are painting it.
Then our object is to make others who may read our language, or listen
to our words, or view our handiwork, construct the mental images of the
situation which furnished the material for our thought.
Our words and other modes of expression are but the description of the
flow of images in our minds, and our problem is to make a similar stream
flow through the mind of the listener; but strange indeed would it be to
make others see a situation which we ourselves cannot see; strange if we
could draw a picture without being able to follow its outlines as we
draw. Or suppose we are teaching science, and our object is to explain
the composition of matter to someone, and make him understand how light,
heat, etc., depend on the theory of matter; strange if the listener
should get a picture if we ourselves are unable to get it. Or, once
more, suppose we are to describe some incident, and our aim is to make
its every detail stand out so clearly that no one can miss a single one.
Is it not evident that we can never make any of these images more clear
to those who listen to us or read our words than they are to ourselves?
2. THE MATERIAL USED BY IMAGINATION
What is the material, the mental content, out of which imagination
builds its structures?
IMAGES THE STUFF OF IMAGINATION.--Nothing can enter the imagination the
elements of which have not been in our past experience and then been
conserved in the form of images. The Indians never dreamed of a heaven
whose streets are paved with gold, and in whose center stands a great
white throne. Their experience had given them no knowledge of these
things; and so, perforce, they must build their heaven out of the images
which they had at command, namely, those connected with the chase and
the forest. So their heaven was the "happy hunting ground," inhabited by
game and enemies over whom the blessed forever triumphed. Likewise the
valiant soldiers whose deadly arrows and keen-edged swords and
battle-axes won on the bloody field of Hastings, did not picture a
far-off day when the opposing lines should kill each other with mighty
engines hurling death from behind parapets a dozen miles away. Firearms
and the explosive powder were yet unknown, hence there were no images
out of which to build such a picture.
I do not mean that your imagination cannot construct an object which has
never before been in your experience as a whole, for the work of the
imagination is to do precisely this thing. It takes the various images
at its disposal and builds them into _wholes_ which may never have
existed before, and which may exist now only as a creation of the mind.
And yet we have put into this new product not a single _element_ which
was not familiar to us in the form of an image of one kind or another.
It is the _form_ which is new; the _material_ is old. This is
exemplified every time an inventor takes the two fundamental parts of a
machine, the _lever_ and the _inclined plane_, and puts them together in
relations new to each other and so evolves a machine whose complexity
fairly bewilders us. And with other lines of thinking, as in mechanics,
inventive power consists in being able to see the old in new relations,
and so constantly build new constructions out of old material. It is
this power which gives us the daring and original thinker, the Newton
whose falling apple suggested to him the planets falling toward the sun
in their orbits; the Darwin who out of the thigh bone of an animal was
able to construct in his imagination the whole animal and the
environment in which it must have lived, and so add another page to the
earth's history.
THE TWO FACTORS IN IMAGINATION.--From the simple facts which we have
just been considering, the conclusion is plain that our power of
imagination depends on two factors; namely, (1) _the materials available
in the form of usable images capable of recall_, and (2) _our
constructive ability_, or the power to group these images into new
_wholes, the process being guided by some purpose or end_. Without this
last provision, the products of our imagination are daydreams with their
"castles in Spain," which may be pleasing and proper enough on
occasions, but which as an habitual mode of thought are extremely
dangerous.
IMAGINATION LIMITED BY STOCK OF IMAGES.--That the mind is limited in its
imagination by its stock of images may be seen from a simple
illustration: Suppose that you own a building made of brick, but that
you find the old one no longer adequate for your needs, and so purpose
to build a new one; and suppose, further, that you have no material for
your new building except that contained in the old structure. It is
evident that you will be limited in constructing your new building by
the material which was in the old. You may be able to build the new
structure in any one of a multitude of different forms or styles of
architecture, so far as the material at hand will lend itself to that
style of building, and providing, further, that you are able to make
the plans. But you will always be limited finally by the character and
amount of material obtainable from the old structure. So with the mind.
The old building is your past experience, and the separate bricks are
the images out of which you must build your new structure through the
imagination. Here, as before, nothing can enter which was not already on
hand. Nothing goes into the new structure so far as its constructive
material is concerned except images, and there is nowhere to get images
but from the results of our past experience.
LIMITED ALSO BY OUR CONSTRUCTIVE ABILITY.--But not only is our
imaginative output limited by the _amount_ of material in the way of
images which we have at our command, but also and perhaps not less by
our _constructive ability_. Many persons might own the old pile of
bricks fully adequate for the new structure, and then fail to get the
new because they were unable to construct it. So, many who have had a
rich and varied experience in many lines are yet unable to muster their
images of these experiences in such a way that new products are
obtainable from them. These have the heavy, draft-horse kind of
intellect which goes plodding on, very possibly doing good service in
its own circumscribed range, but destined after all to service in the
narrow field with its low, drooping horizon. They are never able to take
a dash at a two-minute clip among equally swift competitors, or even
swing at a good round pace along the pleasant highways of an experience
lying beyond the confines of the narrow _here_ and _now_. These are the
minds which cannot discover relations; which cannot _think_. Minds of
this type can never be architects of their own fate, or even builders,
but must content themselves to be hod carriers.
THE NEED OF A PURPOSE.--Nor are we to forget that we cannot
intelligently erect our building until we know the _purpose_ for which
it is to be used. No matter how much building material we may have on
hand, nor how skillful an architect we may be, unless our plans are
guided by some definite aim, we shall be likely to end with a structure
that is fanciful and useless. Likewise with our thought structure.
Unless our imagination is guided by some aim or purpose, we are in
danger of drifting into mere daydreams which not only are useless in
furnishing ideals for the guidance of our lives, but often become
positively harmful when grown into a habit. The habit of daydreaming is
hard to break, and, continuing, holds our thought in thrall and makes it
unwilling to deal with the plain, homely things of everyday life. Who
has not had the experience of an hour or a day spent in a fairyland of
dreams, and awakened at the end to find himself rather dissatisfied with
the prosaic round of duties which confronted him! I do not mean to say
that we should _never_ dream; but I know of no more pernicious mental
habit than that of daydreaming carried to excess, for it ends in our
following every will-o'-the-wisp of fancy, and places us at the mercy of
every chance suggestion.
3. TYPES OF IMAGINATION
Although imagination enters every field of human experience, and busies
itself with every line of human interest, yet all its activities can be
classed under two different types. These are (1) _reproductive_, and (2)
_creative_ imagination.
REPRODUCTIVE IMAGINATION.--Reproductive imagination is the type we use
when we seek to reproduce in our minds the pictures described by others,
or pictures from our own past experience which lack the completeness
and fidelity to make them true memory.
The narration or description of the story book, the history or geography
text; the tale of adventure recounted by traveler or hunter; the account
of a new machine or other invention; fairy tales and myths--these or any
other matter that may be put into words capable of suggesting images to
us are the field for reproductive imagination. In this use of the
imagination our business is to follow and not lead, to copy and not
create.
CREATIVE IMAGINATION.--But we must have leaders, originators--else we
should but imitate each other and the world would be at a standstill.
Indeed, every person, no matter how humble his station or how humdrum
his life, should be in some degree capable of initiative and
originality. Such ability depends in no small measure on the power to
use creative imagination.
Creative imagination takes the images from our own past experience or
those gleaned from the work of others and puts them together in new and
original forms. The inventor, the writer, the mechanic or the artist who
possesses the spirit of creation is not satisfied with _mere_
reproduction, but seeks to modify, to improve, to originate. True, many
important inventions and discoveries have come by seeming accident, by
being stumbled upon. Yet it holds that the person who thus stumbles upon
the discovery or invention is usually one whose creative imagination is
actively at work _seeking_ to create or discover in his field. The
world's progress as a whole does not come by accident, but by creative
planning. Creative imagination is always found at the van of progress,
whether in the life of an individual or a nation.
4. TRAINING THE IMAGINATION
Imagination is highly susceptible of cultivation, and its training
should constitute one of the most important aims of education. Every
school subject, but especially such subjects as deal with description
and narration--history, literature, geography, nature study and
science--is rich in opportunities for the use of imagination. Skillful
teaching will not only find in these subjects a means of training the
imagination, but will so employ imagination in their study as to make
them living matter, throbbing with life and action, rather than so many
dead words or uninteresting facts.
GATHERING OF MATERIAL FOR IMAGINATION.--Theoretically, then, it is not
hard to see what we must do to cultivate our imagination. In the first
place, we must take care to secure a large and usable _stock of images_
from all fields of perception. It is not enough to have visual images
alone or chiefly, for many a time shall we need to build structures
involving all the other senses and the motor activities as well. This
means that we must have a first-hand contact with just as large an
environment as possible--large in the world of Nature with all her
varied forms suited to appeal to every avenue of sense; large in our
contact with people in all phases of experience, laughing with those who
laugh and weeping with those who weep; large in contact with books, the
interpreters of the men and events of the past. We must not only let all
these kinds of environment drift in upon us as they may chance to do,
but we must deliberately _seek_ to increase our stock of experience;
for, after all, experience lies at the bottom of imagination as of every
other mental process. And not only must we thus put ourselves in the way
of acquiring new experience, but we must by recall and reconstruction,
as we saw in an earlier discussion, keep our imagery fresh and usable.
For whatever serves to improve our images, at the same time is bettering
the very foundation of imagination.
WE MUST NOT FAIL TO BUILD.--In the second place, we must not fail _to
build_. For it is futile to gather a large supply of images if we let
the material lie unused. How many people there are who put in all their
time gathering material for their structure, and never take time to do
the building! They look and listen and read, and are so fully occupied
in absorbing the immediately present that they have no time to see the
wider significance of the things with which they deal. They are like the
students who are too busy studying to have time to think. They are so
taken up with receiving that they never perform the higher act of
combining. They are the plodding fact gatherers, many of them doing good
service, collecting material which the seer and the philosopher, with
their constructive power, build together into the greater wholes which
make our systems of thought. They are the ones who fondly think that, by
reading books full of wild tales and impossible plots, they are training
their imagination. For them, sober history, no matter how heroic or
tragic in its quiet movements, is too tame. They have not the patience
to read solid and thoughtful literature, and works of science and
philosophy are a bore. These are the persons who put in all their time
in looking at and admiring other people's houses, and never get time to
do any building for themselves.
WE SHOULD CARRY OUR IDEALS INTO ACTION.--The best training for the
imagination which I know anything about is that to be obtained by taking
our own material and from it building our own structure. It is true
that it will help to look through other people's houses enough to
discover their style of building: we should read. But just as it is not
necessary for us to put in all the time we devote to looking at houses,
in inspecting doll houses and Chinese pagodas, so it is not best for us
to get all our notions of imaginative structures from the marvelous and
the unreal; we get good training for the imagination from reading
"Hiawatha," but so can we from reading the history of the primitive
Indian tribes. The pictures in "Snowbound" are full of suggestion for
the imagination: but so is the history of the Puritans in New England.
But even with the best of models before us, it is not enough to follow
others' building. We must construct stories for ourselves, must work out
plots for our own stories; we must have time to meditate and plan and
build, not idly in the daydream, but purposefully, and then make our
images real by _carrying them out in activity_, if they are of such a
character that this is possible; we must build our ideals and work to
them in the common course of our everyday life; we must think for
ourselves instead of forever following the thinking of others; we must
_initiate_ as well as imitate.
5. PROBLEMS FOR OBSERVATION AND INTROSPECTION
1. Explain the cause and the remedy in the case of such errors as the
following:
Children who defined mountain as land 1,000 or more feet in height
said that the factory smokestack was higher than the mountain
because it "went straight up" and the mountain did not.
Children often think of the horizon as fastened to the earth.
Islands are thought of as floating on the water.
2. How would you stimulate the imagination of a child who does not seem
to picture or make real the descriptions in reading, geography, etc.? Is
it possible that such inability may come from an insufficient basis in
observation, and hence in images?
3. Classify the school subjects, including domestic science and manual
training, as to their ability to train (1) reproductive and (2) creative
imagination.
4. Do you ever skip the descriptive parts of a book and read the
narrative? As you read the description of a bit of natural scenery, does
it rise before you? As you study the description of a battle, can you
see the movements of the troops?
5. Have you ever planned a house as you think you would like it? Can you
see it from all sides? Can you see all the rooms in their various
finishings and furnishings?
6. What plans and ideals have you formed, and what ones are you at
present following? Can you describe the process by which your plans or
ideals change? Do you ever try to put yourself in the other person's
place?
7. Take some fanciful unreality which your imagination has constructed
and see whether you can select from it familiar elements from actual
experiences.
8. What use do you make of imagination in the common round of duties in
your daily life? What are you doing to improve your imagination?