Imagination begins in infancy; grows in the schoolroom and the playground; develops rapidly in the period of youth; enlarges itself in young adulthood, attains sobriety in middle-age; and never ceases its activity so long as mind endures. It is necessary to make this emphatic statement, because at the outset we wish to convince you that you have in your mental nature a power that can transform your life; first in thought and afterward in deed.
Right and Wrong Vision
Remember, the vision must be right. You can have a right one and turn it to good account. John Howard envisioned an improved prison system, and no self-sacrifice was allowed to stand in the way of its coining to pass. Hence the reforms which followed the publication of his State of Prisons in England and Wales, and which arose out of his personal visits to penal establishments. On the other hand a nation had envisioned a world in which its genius should predominate by the will of God, and nothing was allowed to stand in the way of its attempted realization. From this only evil could follow.
In like manner you can imagine a great financial future and begin to work for that alone, if your soul is built that way; or you can imagine a life with steady and proportionate advance as its chief characteristic; but vision you must have, if you are to get the best out of your powers. To form a purpose and to devise a plan for carrying it into action, is to use the imagination in constructing a picture of the future. That future should be a blend of the real and the ideal, uniting the, responsibilities of financial security and true citizenship with the needs of the higher culture.
Images and Imagery
The first part of the word “imagination” is “image“. An image is often thought of as a concrete object, like the white plaster images carried by Italian peddlers, or the religious images of saints and holy persons used for devotional purposes.?But the images here referred to are, of course, purely mental.
For instance, when we ask you if you have been to the Zoo, there arises instantly in your mind a picture of the buildings as you saw them, and of the animals that impressed you most; perhaps the giraffe, or the figure of some great elephant. If you have never been there, you have no images in your mind; or, if you know the place only by photographs of it, your imagining power is restricted to that.?We can reproduce, faintly or vividly, only that which in some way we have known by means of the senses.
Imagery and Mental Efficiency
It follows, then, that the ability to use the sense images of our past experience is of real importance. Perception lays the foundation of a fruitful mentality by living a full and complete sense life, thereby gathering a rich harvest of images of all kinds; and we have now to show how the ability to reproduce them, and the habit of expressing them, contribute their quota to the development of mental efficiency. Let us suppose a novelist wishes to suggest to his readers, by means of a phrase, a man who is very careful and economical in small things. He might express himself in this way: “John Jones put down his pen, turned down the gas, and was soon walking quickly down Oxford Street.” The sentence is bald and bare. By way of contrast notice how Arnold Bennett expresses the idea in one of his novels:
“He dropped his pen, reduced the gas to a speck of blue, and in half a minute was hurrying along Oxford Street.”
The difference is at once discernible. To turn down the gas is something; but to reduce it to a speck of blue is to make us see the thing realistically. Besides, it shows mind: a desire for economy. One of the primary qualifications of a novelist is this power of reproductive imagination; he must have lived the life of observation so fully that when he writes about people and things he can see them, hear them, and “sense” them in every possible way. He must also make his readers “sense” them. That is one reason why some of Dickens characters, for instance, are as real as if they had actually lived; indeed, Mr. Micawber and Mark Tapley are, if anything, more real, to a certain type of mind, than a distant relative could be.
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