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 enter135 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.
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?
