after they were first experienced, little will remain of them after a very short
time. It is by repeating them often in experience through imagery that they
become fixed, so that they stand ready to do our bidding when we need next to
use them.
The Reconstruction of Our Images.—To richness of experience and frequency
of the recall of our images we must add one more factor; namely, that of their
reconstruction or working over. Few if any images are exact recalls of former
percepts of objects. Indeed, such would be neither possible nor desirable. The
images which we recall are recalled for a purpose, or in view of some future
activity, and hence must be selective, or made up of the elements of several or
many former related images.
Thus the boy who wishes to construct a box without a pattern to follow recalls
the images of numerous boxes he may have seen, and from them all he has a
new image made over from many former percepts and images, and this new
image serves him as a working model. In this way he not only gets a copy which
he can follow to make his box, but he also secures a new product in the form of
an image different from any he ever had before, and is therefore by so much the
richer. It is this working over of our stock of old images into new and richer and
more suggestive ones that constitutes the essence of constructive imagination.
The more types of imagery into which we can put our thought, the more fully is
it ours and the better our images. The spelling lesson needs not only to be taken
in through the eye, that we may retain a visual image of the words, but also to be
recited orally, so that the ear may furnish an auditory image, and the organs of
speech a motor image of the correct forms. It needs also to be written, and thus
given into the keeping of the hand, which finally needs most of all to know and
retain it.
The reading lesson should be taken in through both the eye and the ear, and then
expressed by means of voice and gesture in as full and complete a way as
possible, that it may be associated with motor images. The geography lesson
needs not only to be read, but to be drawn, or molded, or constructed. The
history lesson should be made to appeal to every possible form of imagery. The
arithmetic lesson must be not only computed, but measured, weighed, and
pressed into actual service.
Thus we might carry the illustration into every line of education and experience,
and the same truth holds. What we desire to comprehend completely and retain