Part 9 (2/2)

5 Try often to recall ies in the various sensory lines; deteres you are least proficient and try to i teacher able, after his class has sung through several scores, to tell that they are flatting?

7 Study your iery carefully for a few days to see whether you can discover your predoery

CHAPTER IX

IMAGINATION

Everyone desires to have a good iree as to what constitutes a good iood iinations,whether you are capable of taking wild flights into i unrealities out of airy nothings You would coinative writers, such as Stevenson, Poe, De Quincey, and judge your power of iination by your ability to produce such tales as made them famous

1 THE PLACE OF IMAGINATION IN MENTAL ECONOMY

But such a ination as that just stated is far too narrow A good iood memory, is the one which serves its owner best If DeQuincey and Poe and Stevenson and Bulwer found the type which led thehts 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 inative power as they in theirs While you ination, they may have been short in the type which will one day make you famous The artisan, the architect, the merchant, the artist, the farination in their vocations not less than the writers need it in theirs, but each needs a specialized kind adapted to the particular hich he has to do

PRACTICAL NATURE OF IMAGINATION--Iht which must deal chiefly with unrealities and impossibilities, and which has for its chief end our a better to do than to follow its wanderings It is, rather, a commonplace, necessary process which illu--a process without which we think and act by haphazard chance or blind ies from our past experiences are ination 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 thes and seers of old, or it goes back to the beginning and we see things in the process of theIt comes into our present and plays a part in every act from the simplest to the ht is to the traveler who carries it as he passes through the darkness, while it casts its bea up what otherould be intolerable gloom

IMAGINATION IN THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY, LITERATURE, AND ART--Let us see soination Suppose I describe to you the battle of the Marne Unless you can take the i, shouting, bleeding soldiers; into forts and entangle bullet and screaes and out of thereat unified complex, then ely without content, and you will lack the power to comprehend the historical event in any coes suggested by the words reconstruct the picture which was in the e Blacksnificance 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 iton's winter at Valley Forge becoet 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 the reality of it will forever escape you

Your power of iination 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 s 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 environreat books unless their characters are to us real men and women--our brothers and sisters, interpreted to us by theless than this, and we are no longer dealing with literature, but ords--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 ielo and the pictures of Raphael are to you so eniously colored canvas What the sculptor and the painter have placed before you hts 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 iination less necessary in other lines of study Without this power of building living, es, there is small use to study science beyond what is immediately present to our senses; for some of the most fundarasped only as we have the power of iet a picture of the molecules of , 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 ie can never at best have more than a most hazy notion of the theory of ht and heat and sound, and ely a juer in his memory, perchance, but which never vitally become a possession of his mind

So with the world of the telescope You nificent 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 systeer 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 ination, or at least one which has more to do with the huo to yourhat shaped and trimmed

And suppose you have never been able to see this hat _in toto_ in your et an idea of hoill look when coeneral notion, because you like red velvet, white plumes, and a turned-up riether 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 s 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 the the 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 the in its entirety, is the only one who is safe to plan the structure And this is the inations of this kind are in demand Only the one who can see in his ” he would create, is capable to plan its construction And ill say that ability to ith ih 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 iination less marked in the formation of our life's ideals and plans Everyone who is not living blindly and aimlessly must have souide 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 e should like to become, and measured ourselves by this pattern But there comes a time e must idealize even the most perfect individual; e invest the character with attributes which we have selected from some other person, and thus worshi+p at a shrine which is partly real and partly ideal

As tioes on, we drop outcorrespondingly ely a construction of our own ilean froe 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 hiht a vision which will never allow hioal which points the direction of his efforts

IMAGINATION AND CONDUCT--Another great field for iination 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” siination ould be the consequences of his rash or unkind words

He would not be unkind, but he did not iine how the other would feel; he did not put himself in the other's place Likeith 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 hiutter with bloated face and bloodshot eyes a decade hence? Or what boy, slyly sarettes, would proceed if he could see his haggard face and nerveless hand a few years farther along? What spendthrift would throay his money on vanities could he vividly see hial 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 doard career?

IMAGINATION AND THINKING--We have already considered the use of is and handiwork of others Let us now look a littleSuppose that, instead of reading a poe 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 e, or listen to our words, or view our handiwork, construct the es of the situation which furnished the ht