VISION, OR THE IDEA 1. Imagination.—Business men as a rule do not realize their indebtedness to imagination. That faculty is commonly thought of, not as a work-horse, but as a thorobred to be driven only by the poet, the artist, the story-writer. The imaginative man is thought of as a dreamer. He may entertain us with the beautiful pictures his mind creates, but we do not expect him to be alert in practical affairs. Few par ents would think their son fitted for a business career because his teachers had discovered that he possessed a vivid and active imagination.
This popular view of imagination is erroneous be cause it rests upon an inadequate conception of the nature of the faculty and upon a superficial idea of business. No man of feeble imagination ever achieved real success in business.
By imagination is meant the mind's ability to recall past experiences—sensations, emotions, feelings, per ceptions—and to cause these to reappear in the con sciousness in combinations of infinite variety.
The simplest act of the imagination is the recollec tion of a past experience, as when a man recalls his enjoyment of a recent fishing excursion—the pic ture of a mountain brook in which he wooed the trout, or the music he heard at the opera last evening, or the picture of the table at which he ate his first home dinner after coming from the camp. These are all simple acts of memory in which imagination plays its part. More or less vivid copies of the originals are reproduced in the consciousness.
But the mind can do more. It may combine all four of these memories and create a new fishing camp, one where he is casting for trout in the mountain stream, eating dinner from the home table, and in the evening listening to the opera, the singers being staged in a grove of pines under Hamlet's "rnajestical roof fretted with golden fire." Here we have constructive or productive imagination, fantastic and dreamlike because past experiences are combined in a way prac tically impossible.
All men possess the power of imagination, and in most people it is a very active faculty; yet much of its activit2,- is purposeless and useless.
2. Visual.—The imaginations of many people re produce most easily sight images, things that have been seen with the eye. This power is the basis of
what is commonly called "visual" memory. Some people quickly forget words that are spoken to them, but will easily commit to memory a poem or an ora tion from a printed page. It is not unusual for a man to recall something that he read as a boy in his geography or history, and to remember exactly whether the fact was stated on the left-hand or right band page or at the top or the bottom of the page.
I know a man who used to sing in a church choir. He was not a very good singer, but he could read the notes and he made a tolerable bass. He has sung no hymns for twenty years, yet he recalls accurately the key of the tune to which each hymn is set. His im agination reproduces before him the page and musical notation of the hymn book. If the music was not actually before him, he could not sing a tune unless his imagination reproduced the notes as they appeared on the page. He has visual memory or imagination. The painter and sculptor possess imagination of this sort in the highest degree.' Men differ greatly in their power to visualize. It is a source of pleasure to the possessor and, as we shall see, can be made to do useful work in business. Without its aid an inventor would be as helpless as the builder who has no tools, or bricks, or lumber.
3. Sound and other sense images.—The ability to recall sounds, impressions on the consciousness pro duced -Ulm the ear, is believed to be rarer than the visual memory or imagination. It is highly devel oped in the blind, for their visual imagination receives no stimulus. It must be especially strong in the musician. The aural imagination of the deaf Bee thoven was able to recombine sounds in his conscious ness and produce marvelous harmonies. We say of such a man that the music is in his soul. People with an "ear for music" are often able to reproduce a melody after hearing it only once. Similarly we are able to reproduce more or less vividly- the sensations of touch, taste and smell, and various painful and pleasant emotions that we have experienced in the past.