The Imagination

In the preceding chapter the remark was made, that perhaps the most astonishing of all the phenomena of human psychology is the power possessed by the mind of retaining past experience out of consciousness. When we are recollecting, as we call it, we are holding in present consciousness some bit of past experience; but the most of which we can thus be immediately conscious is only an infinitesimal fraction of our entire knowledge. For example, it may be a single word in a foreign language well known to us; but where are all the other words of that language? At present I am not thinking of these; they are not before my mind; yet they are in me somewhere and somehow; because, if it were necessary, I could summon them, one after another, into consciousness. All we have ever seen or heard, all we have experienced or learned, all we have done or sufifered must somehow be

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kept hold of by the mind. As was remarked in last chapter, behind the stage on which our present conscious experience is enacted there stretches a vast, silent region of unconsciousness, in which past experience is preserved. This part of the mind has been compared to a treasure-house, divided into many rooms and fitted with shelves and drawers, in which different kinds of knowledge are stowed away; and the size and spaciousness of this internal magazine differ in different persons according to the length of life, the intensity of thought, the variety of experience of each individual.

In front of this storehouse stands the stage or theatre of present conscious experience; and recollection can summon to the platform, for present service, any of the materials within. But there is another mental power which likewise comes to the door of the storehouse and summons forth the forms of past experience, to make use of them for its own purposes. This is the Imagination; and in the present chapter we have to investigate what are its peculiar functions.

The most palpable difference between memory and imagination is, that, while recollection, when raising out of the memory the forms of past experience, revives these exactly as they were when put into the memory, and, indeed, displays its excellence in the truthfulness with which it can reproduce the past exactly as it was experienced, the imagination, on the contrary, transmutes into shapes of its own the materials with which it is supplied from memory’s storehouse. Hence the epithet frequently applied to it — the ‘’ creative” imagination. To a very large extent the imagination is dependent on memory; for it has to borrow all its materials from the stores which memory has accumulated; but, for its own purposes, it alters these in a hundred ways, adding or subtracting, separating or combining, subduing or heightening. A blind man, who has had no experience of light, cannot, by the force of the imagination, conceive what colour is, nor can a person born deaf conceive what sound is; but a seeing man can imagine thousands of pageants which he has never witnessed, and a hearing man can imagine hundreds of conversations to which he has not listened. The mind, being acquainted with human beings of the ordinary size and attributes, can diminish these to Lilliputians or enlarge them to Brobdingnagians; it can combine the body of a man with the limbs of a goat and so make a satyr, or the head of the woman with the body of a fish and so make a mermaid; it can put the brains, the passions and the language of human beings into other animals and so produce fables like those of sop; or it can combine all the scattered excellences it has ever seen or heard of and, magnifying and intensifying these, create a glorious city, peopled with ten thousand times ten thousand, and thousands of thousands, and so make a heaven. All this is the work of the imagination; and from what has been said it is easy to define what the peculiarity of this faculty is: it takes out of the storehouse of memory the materials of experience and, under impulses still to be explained, alters them and fashions them into novel shapes of its own.

The simplest form of imagination is Dreaming; and in this familiar experience, it is easy to test the truth of what has just been said. Dreaming is dependent on memory. Unless we could remember having seen men, women and children, houses and streets, earth and sky, and having heard words, music, laughter, we could not have the dreams in which such objects figure. But in what altered shapes do these appear in dreams! Dreams are like life, and yet how unlike! All our bygone experiences of seeing, hearing, reading, meditating, rejoicing, sorrowing are there, yet in forms the most fantastical. These phantasmagories, which succeed one another with such amazing rapidity, dissolving and rearranging themselves with kaleidoscopic suddenness, are the work of the imagination; but in this case it is extremely difficult to say on what impulse or on what principle it acts. Everyone knows what it is, on awaking from a dream, of unusually surprising character, to ask, Was it I who had these thoughts? or was it some breath from heaven or blast from hell which, with the arbitrariness of the wind, was compelling the contents of memory into such grotesque shapes?

A kindred form of imagination is Reverie or Day-dreaming. Children are said to see faces in the fire, and youth to build castles in the air; but, in truth, these practices belong to all ages. In hours of leisure, and especially in the watches of the night, when we are lying awake, images and scenes rise out of the dark background of the mind and present themselves to the inner eye. These may be images of fear, such as a child sees when it awakes in the dark, or they may be scenes of radiant beauty and glowing hope, such as haunt the mind of youth. Much of reverie is, indeed, mere recollection, the mind living over and over again remembered experiences; yet even in such cases there is always an element of pure imagination; for, by omitting the disagreeable element in past realities, we make our experiences better than they actually were. In even the sweetest recollections of bygone experience the choicest morsel is that which did not take place, and the brightest scene is always the one after the last.

So unlike ourselves are our dreams sometimes that we wonder by whose mind they were created; but the reverse is the case with our day-dreams: these are the very picture of ourselves. When the restraints imposed by business and society are removed, the mind springs back to its native shape, and from the subjects to which it then betakes itself, it may be learned whether it be fair or foul. If it could be known what anyone is habitually brooding upon when he is lying awake, an infallible index would be found to his character; and by the same test everyone is able to know himself.

It is common to warn the young against reverie; but this advice requires qualification. Certainly reverie may be indulged in to such excess as to make the whole life dreamy and purposeless; some people, instead of dreaming in the pauses of their work, may rather be said to work in the pauses of their dreams. But, on the other hand, there can be no depth of thought or character without the meditative habit. The finest thoughts come to us not when we are pursuing a subject, as the saying is, but when the mind is lying still and the subject is acting on it of its own accord.^ What does require vigilance is the nature of the subjects on which the mind in such moods ruminates. If themes foul and forbidden are permitted then to take possession of the mind, they destroy the very power of thinking.

When lust
Lets in defilement to the inward parts,
The soul grows clotted by contagion,
Imbodies and imbrutes, till she quite lose
The divine property of her first being.

1 Amiel characteristically comes to its defence: “Eeverie, like the rain of night, restores colour and force to thoughts which have been blanched and wearied by the heat of the day. With gentle, fertilising power it awakens within us a thousand sleeping germs, and, as though in play, gathers round us materials for the future, and images for the use of talent. Eeverie is the Sunday of thought; and who knows which is the more important and fruitful for man, the laborious tension of the week or the life-giving repose of the Sabbath? It is like a bath, which gives vigour and suppleness to the whole being, to the mind as to the body. It is the sign and festival of liberty, a joyous and wholesome banquet, the banquet of the butterfly wandering from flower to flower over the hills and in the fields. And remember, the soul, too, is a butter fly,” ‘* Journal,” I, pp, 42, 43,

Such imaginings must be fought at the threshold and kept rigorously out, or the inner man will grow leprous from head to foot. Happy he whose imagination, when the strain of reality is relaxed, springs spontaneously into a region of pure and wholesome fancies; but happiest he who can say, “In the night His song shall be with me, and my prayer to the God of my life “.

From what has been said it will have been gathered that the principal function of imagination is to improve on reality. It creates a world brighter and more perfect than that in which we live. In children we see this power marvellously displayed. Give them a few bits of wood, roughly cut and brightly painted, a few clippings of cloth, a few bricks, a little sand or mud, and out of these they will form for themselves a world in which there are kings and queens, the tinker and the tailor, the soldier and the sailor, and these figures perform all the movements and activities of real life, as far as these are known to a child.

Why is it that children, aye, and children also of an older growth, delight in stories? It is because in these life is seen heightened and perfected. In ordinary life there is little scope for adventure, and our achievements lag far behind our desires; but in a story, whether it be historical or only invented, we see a rare and glorious moment, a heroic resolution, a perfect action. This is what we should like life to be; it is the ideal, undiminished and undimmed by the obstacles and qualifications of reality.

Herein lies the explanation of the pleasure derived from works of art. A song or a piece of music is a combination of sounds more exquisite than those which ordinary experience affords; a picture is the essence distilled from the beauty presented in ordinary scenes. Especially is the enjoyment due to works of imaginative literature to be thus explained. When we open a book of poetry or romance, the ordinary work, in which we have been toiling and moiling, fretted with fatigue and failure, fades away, and we enter a world where all is ampler and more serene. Ordinary existence is slow of movement and grey of hue; but here a year is compressed into an hour, the colours are bright, the crisis exciting, the end satisfying. In the epic one stirring episode succeeds another, in the drama some great principle receives perfect illustration, in the novel love is crowned and justice vindicated.

Is it good thus to live in a world so different from reality? That depends on circumstances. Such reading may easily be carried to excess. If, instead of being an occasional treat, it is made the daily bread of the mind, it cannot but enfeeble. We may dwell so much among the bright creations of the imagination that the duties of ordinary life appear dull and irksome. We may so exhaust our sympathies on imaginary heroes and heroines as to have none left for actual human beings. It is possible to shed floods of tears over women who suffer and children who die on paper and yet not have a tear to shed or a penny to spare for real distress. Fiction not infrequently conveys entirely mistaken notions of what life is, and leads readers to expect success not in the paths of steady diligence and perseverance, in which alone the majority must find it, but through some effort of genius or stroke of chance, which cannot fall to the lot of one in a million. But imaginative literature may pursue a better path. There is poetry which reveals the depth and mystery of which the actual world everywhere is full, and there is fiction which helps us to divine a secret deep and tender in every heart we meet. Of such works of imagination the influence may be beneficial; for the wisdom of life consists in appreciating the romance of ordinary existence and enjoying the poetry of common things.

But, if the office of imagination is, as we have seen, to improve upon reality, only a little reflection is needed to perceive that it may fulfil a purpose far more practical than the creation of an imaginary world, to serve as a retreat from the constant insistence of reality; for it may apply itself to the improvement of the actual world. The imagination creates many worlds which never have any existence except in fancy; but every conception which anyone has of a better state of things in the actual world is also a work of the imagination. The world would never rise one step above its present condition unless there were continually presenting themselves to human minds visions of possible improvement and perfection. Humanity is lighted along the path of progress by the torch of imagination.

Every time a workman is fashioning anything on the bench or the anvil, he sees in his mind’s eye the perfect article; this determines every stroke and touch he gives to the unformed materials in his hands; and, the more perfect and beautiful is the conception of the finished article in his imagination, the more difficult will he be to please with rough and bungling workmanship. When a mechanic, in attending at his post, sees some part of the machine where the action might be simplified or where a mechanical arrangement might take the place of human labour, the conception which forms itself in his mind of the machine, thus improved, is a work of imagination. When Edison sits in his laboratory and thinks out the undiscovered qualities which may reside in this material and that, or what kind of arrangement of materials would fill up the gap between invention and a desired effect, it is largely with the imagination that he is working. It was because Columbus had a stronger imagination than the rest of Europe that he believed in a new world on the other side of the globe. It was for a similar reason that David Livingstone could not settle down to ordinary missionary work on the outskirts of heathenism, but was forever dreaming of the secrets hidden in the depths of the desert, till at last the desire to go and see became overpowering and made him the greatest discoverer of modern times.

See a fine section on “Imagination in the Grand Callings” in Johnson: “The Religious Use of the Imagination “. It was Tyndall, in his famous Belfast Address, who first

The vision of an improved world in the imagination may be a dream and nothing more; in millions of cases it is so; but, on the other hand, the world is never improved without a preceding dream in someone’s imagination. Youth is full of visions; the great majority of these subsequently dissolve and leave not a rack behind; but woe to him who in his youth has no visions — no vision of his own future, no vision of the future of the world — no passionate sense of the wrongs and imperfections of society, no plan for improving the land of his nativity or the place of his abode, no enthusiasm for the redemption and perfection of humanity. I like beyond measure that saying of Burns, that when he was “beardless, young and blate,” he had a wish —

Even then a wish — I mind its power — A wish that to my latest hour

Shall strongly heave my breast — That I for puir auld Scotia’s sake
Some usefu’ plan or beuk could make,

Or sing a sang at least.

This is very near religion. What is religion? It could hardly be better defined than it has

brought home to the general understanding the part played by the imagination in scientific investigation.

been by St. Peter in these words: ‘’ We, according to His promise, look for new heavens and a new earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness “. Who is a Christian? I answer. The man, who, taught by Christ, looks forward not only to heaven, but to a new earth, in which righteousness shall reign and from which all the unrighteousness of every kind with which the earth is at present disfigured shall be banished, and who, trusting to the grace of Christ, is doing his part to make that good tim6 come. He is a Christian who cannot look on a fellow-creature, however degraded, without having a vision of imprisoned possibilities, the release and development of which will lead to glory, honour and immortality, and who, in the spirit of human brotherhood, seeks to save the lost.

But no man can thus feel and work for others who has not first had a vision of himself. Professor Drummond used to say, that, in our day, many are made Christians not by conviction of sin, but by the conviction of righteousness. Like some other sayings from the same quarter, this has an air of paradox; yet there is in it an undoubted truth. The impulse which carries a man to Christ may be not the thought of a horrible pit beneath him, into which he is falling.

but of an ideal above him, which he is struggling in vain to reach. Only I should say, that such a sense of an unattained purity and nobility would naturally create at the same time, in any man who has felt it, a horror of his actual self and a passionate desire to be separated from the evil past. The imagination, at all events, can do us no better service than when it gives us such a view of the possibilities of our own life that the desire to realise these becomes our absorbing passion. Or rather, its highest service is when it furnishes us with such an enchanting image of the Man Christ Jesus that we follow Him by an irresistible impulse, and our whole existence becomes a ceaseless prayer to be like Him in mind and heart, in speech and behaviour.

The imagination, as thus interpreted, is almost identical with the Christian conception of hope; and the Scripture says that we are ‘* saved” by hope. Protestantism says, indeed, that we are saved by faith, and to this Romanism has retorted by affirming that we are saved by love. Not a few who can understand either of these latter statements could hardly attach any meaning to the statement that we are saved by hope. Yet it is the truth; and, though faith and love have got before it in the race, the turn of hope will come, to be realised and prized as an instrument of salvation. The most vivid picture of the commencement of salvation in the Scriptures is the Parable of the Prodigal Son; and it is manifest that the Prodigal was saved by hope. The actual sight of his wretchedness among the swine, though an essential element in his redemption, would never have taken him home, had he not, by the force of imagination, seen the possibility of a position totally different from that which he was occupying in the far country. No less is the continuation of salvation, which we call sanctification, due to the same faculty. The habit of brooding over our own im^Derfections or mourning over our own shortcomings will never do much good, unless accompanied with the vision of something better to draw us up and on. We must have the faculty of seeing, in contrast with the actual self, a self more worthy and Christlike; and then this hope makes contentment with our imperfections impossible, because it fills us with a divine hunger for a more developed and harmonious character. The most redeeming quality of hope, however, is the identification of our desires with Christ’s redemptive purpose for the world. By Himself this was designated the

Kingdom of God; and, under the same title, it is captivating in our own day the imagination of His followers. The Kingdom of God is a dream; and yet it is more than a dream. The poet creates an ideal world, but he knows that the light by which it is illuminated will never be seen on sea or land; the philosopher creates an ideal state — his Republic or Utopia — but he knows that it will never exist except on paper, and he acquiesces in the actual arrangements of the very imperfect terrestrial country of which he is a citizen. But the Christian expects his dream to come true. Indeed, he is sure of it, because he is sure of God and His promises, of Christ and His destiny. He goes further: he works for the coming of the Kingdom. There may be a weak Christianity which talks of the battle of Armageddon and the glories of the millennium, yet folds its hands and does nothing; but, where genuine hope has been generated, it counts the cost and looks for long results; it begins at once and does not despise the day of small things; it lays hold of the wheels of things and lifts them out of the ruts of evil custom; and in every triumph, however imperfect, it sees a prefiguration of the coming consummation.

The great modern form of hope is missionary activity; and the revival in our day of this function of true Christianity is the most cheering of all signs of the times. From the point of view of the natural man the conversion of the vrorld is a chimera; but to many minds, destitute of neither sense nor knowledge, it is a certainty; and they are even speaking of its accomplishment within a single generation. Not only, however, are they speaking: they are planning, studying, praying, sacrificing. They are estimating the obstacles and the encouragements, and they are of opinion that greater is He who is for us than all they that can be against us.

Christian hope, however, does not exhaust itself in picturing either the spiritual development in the individual or the missionary conquest of the world in these earthly years and on this terrestrial sphere: it has always occupied itself, besides, with picturing a life to be entered on after the completion of man’s present career. So it was at the beginning; even a scoffer like Gibbon acknowledging that the expectation of immortality was one of the explanations of the early diffusion of Christianity. The more gloomy and desperate the situation of the martyrs was on earth, the more distinctly did they see the crown of life awaiting their arrival in another world. The two greatest works of the imagination in literature are the ‘* Vision “of Dante and the ‘’Paradise Lost” of Milton; and both are efforts of the imagination to make the unseen world palpable in both its attractions and its terrors. Some allege that visions like Dante’s and Milton’s no longer affect the modern mind, so as either to attract or to warn. If so, the sooner new imaginative forms are invented to bring home the eternal realities the better will it be. The testimony of the Son of God to the existence of an eternal world, out of which He had come and to which He was returning, has lost none of its impressiveness; the human spirit is not so dead that it cannot feel the glory of its own immortality; and, therefore, it ought not to be beyond the power of Christian genius to body forth the hopes and fears of eternity in such shapes as to draw the soul with passionate desire on the one hand and affect it with wholesome terrors on the other. Someone has said that the lever by which this world is moved must have its fulcrum outside of the world; and the Scripture itself, speaking of the hope of heaven, asserts: “Everyone that hath this hope in him purifieth himself even ?(s He is pure “.