phases of experience, laughing with those who laugh and weeping with those
who weep; large in contact with books, the interpreters of the men and events of
the past. We must not only let all these kinds of environment drift in upon us as
they may chance to do, but we must deliberately seek to increase our stock of
experience; for, after all, experience lies at the bottom of imagination as of every
other mental process. And not only must we thus put ourselves in the way of
acquiring new experience, but we must by recall and reconstruction, as we saw
in an earlier discussion, keep our imagery fresh and usable. For whatever serves
to improve our images, at the same time is bettering the very foundation of
imagination.
We Must Not Fail to Build.—In the second place, we must not fail to build. For
it is futile to gather a large supply of images if we let the material lie unused.
How many people there are who put in all their time gathering material for their
structure, and never take time to do the building! They look and listen and read,
and are so fully occupied in absorbing the immediately present that they have no
time to see the wider significance of the things with which they deal. They are
like the students who are too busy studying to have time to think. They are so
taken up with receiving that they never perform the higher act of combining.
They are the plodding fact gatherers, many of them doing good service,
collecting material which the seer and the philosopher, with their constructive
power, build together into the greater wholes which make our systems of
thought. They are the ones who fondly think that, by reading books full of wild
tales and impossible plots, they are training their imagination. For them, sober
history, no matter how heroic or tragic in its quiet movements, is too tame. They
have not the patience to read solid and thoughtful literature, and works of
science and philosophy are a bore. These are the persons who put in all their
time in looking at and admiring other people's houses, and never get time to do
any building for themselves.
We Should Carry Our Ideals into Action.—The best training for the
imagination which I know anything about is that to be obtained by taking our
own material and from it building our own structure. It is true that it will help to
look through other people's houses enough to discover their style of building: we
should read. But just as it is not necessary for us to put in all the time we devote
to looking at houses, in inspecting doll houses and Chinese pagodas, so it is not
best for us to get all our notions of imaginative structures from the marvelous
and the unreal; we get good training for the imagination from reading
"Hiawatha," but so can we from reading the history of the primitive Indian