The great artists are never quite satisfied with their creations. Their imaginations have built for them an ideal which they cannot quite convert into reality.
A farmer unconsciously constructs an ideal farm in an ideal climate, periods of rainfall and sunshine at just the right intervals.
The ideal is the highest product of the imagination. Using those past experiences which have given us the most pleasurable emotions, or have proved themselves of golden worth to our reason, the imagination, spurred sometimes by our pleasure-loving senses, sometimes by our conscience, sometimes by our desire for success and happiness, pictures those experiences to us in a combination which seems absolutely perfect. Thus it is we get the ideal. It is a human product and may be far from perfection, yet to every man his ideal has all the qualities of perfection.
Unconsciously the imagination of every man is for ever at work building ideals that charm his soul and stir him to activity. The ideals of one man may seem base, vulgar and commonplace to a man of higher type, whereas the ideals of the latter may seem fool ish, impracticable, worthless to the man of cheaper ta:stes.
No man can subdue his imagination and keep it from building ideals. A man's imagination keeps for ever at its work and constructs for him ideals in ac cordance with which he must live. In the firma ment of every man's soul there is a polar star—it is the ideal that dominates his life.
Such being the case, it is important that each of us give some thought to the character of the ideals which our imagination is building. If we examine them critically with our judgment, we naay discover that their perfection is only apparent, and that their dom inance in our life will sooner or later bring us into sackcloth and ashes. While we cannot chain our imagination or hitch it to a post, yet we can, if we will, supervise • its marvelous work and make it build for us ideals which we may struggle toward without disloyalty to our reason or to our con science.
If a business man's ideal is merely the accumula tion of a great fortune, is be not merely chasing the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow? 7. Vision and judgment.—The reader will have
already discovered that imagination is a faculty that serves no useful purpose unless bridled and guided by judgment and common sense.
To get an idea of what imagination can do by itself a man has only to recall one of his dreams. During our sleep the will and reason are at rest, but imagina tion, particularly if we have overeaten before going to bed, often amuses itself by galloping around the universe. In our dreams imagination shows us noth ing new, but it often makes up most startling combina tions out of the materials consciously and uncon sciously stored in our memories. The notion that dreams possess any real significance as regards our future belongs to the same category of humbug as the telling of fortunes by cards or by the grounds in a tea cup. Dreams usually mean that we are suffering from some intestinal disturbance, that we are sleep ing lightly, and that imagination, perhaps, is seeking to amuse us with its wondrous kaleidoscope.
Let us here recall the fact that the mind is a unit, a single entity, and that what we call imagination is a name we give to one of its powers or faculties. Rea son is another power, memory another. Just as with our bodies we can crawl, walk, run, climb, or lift, so with our mind we can reason, feel, suffer, enjoy, re member, imagine. The whole mind is occupied in each one of these forms of its activity. Sometimes, being weary, the mind may lazily indulge in the pleas ures of imagination and not seek to make the pictures presented conform to the rules of reason or the facts of memory. When the imagination is permitted to work in this haphazard, uncontrolled fashion, we call it phantasy. Aladdin's lamp, the Lilliputians in "Gulliver's Travels," the yesterdays and tomorrows of "Alice in Wonderland," are all delightful crea tions of the phantasy, that is, of an imagination over which reason deliberately held a very loose rein.