listen to us or read our words than they are to ourselves?
2. THE MATERIAL USED BY IMAGINATION
What is the material, the mental content, out of which imagination builds its
structures?
Images the Stuff of Imagination.—Nothing can enter the imagination the
elements of which have not been in our past experience and then been conserved
in the form of images. The Indians never dreamed of a heaven whose streets are
paved with gold, and in whose center stands a great white throne. Their
experience had given them no knowledge of these things; and so, perforce, they
must build their heaven out of the images which they had at command, namely,
those connected with the chase and the forest. So their heaven was the "happy
hunting ground," inhabited by game and enemies over whom the blessed forever
triumphed. Likewise the valiant soldiers whose deadly arrows and keen-edged
swords and battle-axes won on the bloody field of Hastings, did not picture a far-
off day when the opposing lines should kill each other with mighty engines
hurling death from behind parapets a dozen miles away. Firearms and the
explosive powder were yet unknown, hence there were no images out of which
to build such a picture.
I do not mean that your imagination cannot construct an object which has never
before been in your experience as a whole, for the work of the imagination is to
do precisely this thing. It takes the various images at its disposal and builds them
into wholes which may never have existed before, and which may exist now only
as a creation of the mind. And yet we have put into this new product not a single
element which was not familiar to us in the form of an image of one kind or
another. It is the form which is new; the material is old. This is exemplified
every time an inventor takes the two fundamental parts of a machine, the lever
and the inclined plane, and puts them together in relations new to each other and
so evolves a machine whose complexity fairly bewilders us. And with other lines
of thinking, as in mechanics, inventive power consists in being able to see the
old in new relations, and so constantly build new constructions out of old
material. It is this power which gives us the daring and original thinker, the
Newton whose falling apple suggested to him the planets falling toward the sun
in their orbits; the Darwin who out of the thigh bone of an animal was able to
construct in his imagination the whole animal and the environment in which it
must have lived, and so add another page to the earth's history.