CHAPTER IX
IMAGINATION
Everyone desires to have a good imagination, yet not all would agree as to what
constitutes a good imagination. If I were to ask a group of you whether you have
good imaginations, many of you would probably at once fall to considering
whether you are capable of taking wild flights into impossible realms of thought
and evolving unrealities out of airy nothings. You would compare yourself with
great imaginative writers, such as Stevenson, Poe, De Quincey, and judge your
power of imagination by your ability to produce such tales as made them
famous.
1. THE PLACE OF IMAGINATION IN MENTAL ECONOMY
But such a measure for the imagination as that just stated is far too narrow. A
good imagination, like a good memory, is the one which serves its owner best. If
DeQuincey and Poe and Stevenson and Bulwer found the type which led them
into such dizzy flights 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 may not rank as
high in some other field of imaginative power as they in theirs. While you may
lack in their particular type of imagination, they may have been short in the type
which will one day make you famous. The artisan, the architect, the merchant,
the artist, the farmer, the teacher, the professional man—all need imagination in
their vocations not less than the writers need it in theirs, but each needs a
specialized kind adapted to the particular work which he has to do.
Practical Nature of Imagination.—Imagination is not a process of thought
which must deal chiefly with unrealities and impossibilities, and which has for
its chief end our amusement when we have nothing better to do than to follow its
wanderings. It is, rather, a commonplace, necessary process which illumines the
way for our everyday thinking and acting—a process without which we think
and act by haphazard chance or blind imitation. It is the process by which the
images from our past experiences are marshaled, and made to serve our present.
Imagination looks into the future and constructs our patterns and lays our plans.