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.
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?
