CHAPTER VIII
MENTAL IMAGES AND IDEAS
As you sit thinking, a company of you together, your thoughts run in many
diverse lines. Yet with all this diversity, your minds possess this common
characteristic: Though your thinking all takes place in what we call the present
moment, it goes on largely in terms of past experiences.
1. THE PART PLAYED BY PAST EXPERIENCE
Present Thinking Depends on Past Experience.—Images or ideas of things
you have seen or heard or felt; of things you have thought of before and which
now recur to you; of things you remember, such as names, dates, places, events;
of things that you do not remember as a part of your past at all, but that belong to
it nevertheless—these are the things which form a large part of your mental
stream, and which give content to your thinking. You may think of a thing that is
going on now, or of one that is to occur in the future; but, after all, you are
dependent on your past experience for the material which you put into your
thinking of the present moment.
Indeed, nothing can enter your present thinking which does not link itself to
something in your past experience. The savage Indian in the primeval forest
never thought about killing a deer with a rifle merely by pulling a trigger, or of
turning a battery of machine guns on his enemies to annihilate them—none of
these things were related to his past experience; hence he could not think in such
terms.
The Present Interpreted by the Past.—Not only can we not think at all except
in terms of our past experience, but even if we could, the present would be
meaningless to us; for the present is interpreted in the light of the past. The
sedate man of affairs who decries athletic sports, and has never taken part in
them, cannot understand the wild enthusiasm which prevails between rival teams
in a hotly contested event. The fine work of art is to the one who has never
experienced the appeal which comes through beauty, only so much of canvas