The Mind and Its Education

G >> George Herbert Betts >> The Mind and Its Education

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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.

THE TWO FACTORS IN IMAGINATION.--From the simple facts which we have
just been considering, the conclusion is plain that our power of
imagination depends on two factors; namely, (1) _the materials available
in the form of usable images capable of recall_, and (2) _our
constructive ability_, or the power to group these images into new
_wholes, the process being guided by some purpose or end_. Without this
last provision, the products of our imagination are daydreams with their
"castles in Spain," which may be pleasing and proper enough on
occasions, but which as an habitual mode of thought are extremely
dangerous.

IMAGINATION LIMITED BY STOCK OF IMAGES.--That the mind is limited in its
imagination by its stock of images may be seen from a simple
illustration: Suppose that you own a building made of brick, but that
you find the old one no longer adequate for your needs, and so purpose
to build a new one; and suppose, further, that you have no material for
your new building except that contained in the old structure. It is
evident that you will be limited in constructing your new building by
the material which was in the old. You may be able to build the new
structure in any one of a multitude of different forms or styles of
architecture, so far as the material at hand will lend itself to that
style of building, and providing, further, that you are able to make
the plans. But you will always be limited finally by the character and
amount of material obtainable from the old structure. So with the mind.
The old building is your past experience, and the separate bricks are
the images out of which you must build your new structure through the
imagination. Here, as before, nothing can enter which was not already on
hand. Nothing goes into the new structure so far as its constructive
material is concerned except images, and there is nowhere to get images
but from the results of our past experience.

LIMITED ALSO BY OUR CONSTRUCTIVE ABILITY.--But not only is our
imaginative output limited by the _amount_ of material in the way of
images which we have at our command, but also and perhaps not less by
our _constructive ability_. Many persons might own the old pile of
bricks fully adequate for the new structure, and then fail to get the
new because they were unable to construct it. So, many who have had a
rich and varied experience in many lines are yet unable to muster their
images of these experiences in such a way that new products are
obtainable from them. These have the heavy, draft-horse kind of
intellect which goes plodding on, very possibly doing good service in
its own circumscribed range, but destined after all to service in the
narrow field with its low, drooping horizon. They are never able to take
a dash at a two-minute clip among equally swift competitors, or even
swing at a good round pace along the pleasant highways of an experience
lying beyond the confines of the narrow _here_ and _now_. These are the
minds which cannot discover relations; which cannot _think_. Minds of
this type can never be architects of their own fate, or even builders,
but must content themselves to be hod carriers.

THE NEED OF A PURPOSE.--Nor are we to forget that we cannot
intelligently erect our building until we know the _purpose_ for which
it is to be used. No matter how much building material we may have on
hand, nor how skillful an architect we may be, unless our plans are
guided by some definite aim, we shall be likely to end with a structure
that is fanciful and useless. Likewise with our thought structure.
Unless our imagination is guided by some aim or purpose, we are in
danger of drifting into mere daydreams which not only are useless in
furnishing ideals for the guidance of our lives, but often become
positively harmful when grown into a habit. The habit of daydreaming is
hard to break, and, continuing, holds our thought in thrall and makes it
unwilling to deal with the plain, homely things of everyday life. Who
has not had the experience of an hour or a day spent in a fairyland of
dreams, and awakened at the end to find himself rather dissatisfied with
the prosaic round of duties which confronted him! I do not mean to say
that we should _never_ dream; but I know of no more pernicious mental
habit than that of daydreaming carried to excess, for it ends in our
following every will-o'-the-wisp of fancy, and places us at the mercy of
every chance suggestion.

3. TYPES OF IMAGINATION

Although imagination enters every field of human experience, and busies
itself with every line of human interest, yet all its activities can be
classed under two different types. These are (1) _reproductive_, and (2)
_creative_ imagination.

REPRODUCTIVE IMAGINATION.--Reproductive imagination is the type we use
when we seek to reproduce in our minds the pictures described by others,
or pictures from our own past experience which lack the completeness
and fidelity to make them true memory.

The narration or description of the story book, the history or geography
text; the tale of adventure recounted by traveler or hunter; the account
of a new machine or other invention; fairy tales and myths--these or any
other matter that may be put into words capable of suggesting images to
us are the field for reproductive imagination. In this use of the
imagination our business is to follow and not lead, to copy and not
create.

CREATIVE IMAGINATION.--But we must have leaders, originators--else we
should but imitate each other and the world would be at a standstill.
Indeed, every person, no matter how humble his station or how humdrum
his life, should be in some degree capable of initiative and
originality. Such ability depends in no small measure on the power to
use creative imagination.

Creative imagination takes the images from our own past experience or
those gleaned from the work of others and puts them together in new and
original forms. The inventor, the writer, the mechanic or the artist who
possesses the spirit of creation is not satisfied with _mere_
reproduction, but seeks to modify, to improve, to originate. True, many
important inventions and discoveries have come by seeming accident, by
being stumbled upon. Yet it holds that the person who thus stumbles upon
the discovery or invention is usually one whose creative imagination is
actively at work _seeking_ to create or discover in his field. The
world's progress as a whole does not come by accident, but by creative
planning. Creative imagination is always found at the van of progress,
whether in the life of an individual or a nation.

4. TRAINING THE IMAGINATION

Imagination is highly susceptible of cultivation, and its training
should constitute one of the most important aims of education. Every
school subject, but especially such subjects as deal with description
and narration--history, literature, geography, nature study and
science--is rich in opportunities for the use of imagination. Skillful
teaching will not only find in these subjects a means of training the
imagination, but will so employ imagination in their study as to make
them living matter, throbbing with life and action, rather than so many
dead words or uninteresting facts.

GATHERING OF MATERIAL FOR IMAGINATION.--Theoretically, then, it is not
hard to see what we must do to cultivate our imagination. In the first
place, we must take care to secure a large and usable _stock of images_
from all fields of perception. It is not enough to have visual images
alone or chiefly, for many a time shall we need to build structures
involving all the other senses and the motor activities as well. This
means that we must have a first-hand contact with just as large an
environment as possible--large in the world of Nature with all her
varied forms suited to appeal to every avenue of sense; large in our
contact with people in all 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 tribes. The pictures in "Snowbound" are full of suggestion for
the imagination: but so is the history of the Puritans in New England.
But even with the best of models before us, it is not enough to follow
others' building. We must construct stories for ourselves, must work out
plots for our own stories; we must have time to meditate and plan and
build, not idly in the daydream, but purposefully, and then make our
images real by _carrying them out in activity_, if they are of such a
character that this is possible; we must build our ideals and work to
them in the common course of our everyday life; we must think for
ourselves instead of forever following the thinking of others; we must
_initiate_ as well as imitate.

5. PROBLEMS FOR OBSERVATION AND INTROSPECTION

1. Explain the cause and the remedy in the case of such errors as the
following:

Children who defined mountain as land 1,000 or more feet in height
said that the factory smokestack was higher than the mountain
because it "went straight up" and the mountain did not.

Children often think of the horizon as fastened to the earth.

Islands are thought of as floating on the water.

2. How would you stimulate the imagination of a child who does not seem
to picture or make real the descriptions in reading, geography, etc.? Is
it possible that such inability may come from an insufficient basis in
observation, and hence in images?

3. Classify the school subjects, including domestic science and manual
training, as to their ability to train (1) reproductive and (2) creative
imagination.

4. Do you ever skip the descriptive parts of a book and read the
narrative? As you read the description of a bit of natural scenery, does
it rise before you? As you study the description of a battle, can you
see the movements of the troops?

5. Have you ever planned a house as you think you would like it? Can you
see it from all sides? Can you see all the rooms in their various
finishings and furnishings?

6. What plans and ideals have you formed, and what ones are you at
present following? Can you describe the process by which your plans or
ideals change? Do you ever try to put yourself in the other person's
place?

7. Take some fanciful unreality which your imagination has constructed
and see whether you can select from it familiar elements from actual
experiences.

8. What use do you make of imagination in the common round of duties in
your daily life? What are you doing to improve your imagination?

CHAPTER X

ASSOCIATION

Whence came the thought that occupies you this moment, and what
determines the next that is to follow? Introspection reveals no more
interesting fact concerning our minds than that our thoughts move in a
connected and orderly array and not in a hit-and-miss fashion. Our
mental states do not throng the stream of consciousness like so many
pieces of wood following each other at random down a rushing current,
now this one ahead, now that. On the contrary, our thoughts come, one
after the other, as they are beckoned or _caused_. The thought now in
the focal point of your consciousness appeared because it sprouted out
of the one just preceding it; and the present thought, before it
departs, will determine its successor and lead it upon the scene. This
is to say that our thought stream possesses not only a continuity, but
also a _unity_; it has coherence and system. This coherence and system,
which operates in accordance with definite laws, is brought about by
what the psychologist calls _association_.

1. THE NATURE OF ASSOCIATION

We may define association, then, as the tendency among our thoughts to
form such a system of bonds with each other that the objects of
consciousness are vitally connected both (1) as they exist at any given
moment, and (2) as they occur in succession in the mental stream.

THE NEURAL BASIS OF ASSOCIATION.--The association of thoughts--ideas,
images, memory--or of a situation with its response, rests primarily on
a neural basis. Association is the result of habit working in neurone
groups. Its fundamental law is stated by James as follows: "When two
elementary brain-processes have been active together or in immediate
succession, one of them, on recurring, tends to propagate its excitement
into the other." This is but a technical statement of the simple fact
that nerve currents flow most easily over the neurone connections that
they have already used.

It is hard to teach an old dog new tricks, because the old tricks employ
familiar, much-used neural paths, while new tricks require the
connecting up of groups of neurones not in the habit of working
together; and the flow of nerve energy is more easily accomplished in
the neurones accustomed to working together. One who learns to speak a
foreign language late in life never attains the facility and ease that
might have been reached at an earlier age. This is because the neural
paths for speech are already set for his mother-tongue, and, with the
lessened plasticity of age, the new paths are hard to establish.

The connections between the various brain areas, or groups of neurones,
are, as we have seen in an earlier chapter, accomplished by means of
_association fibers_. This function requires millions of neurones, which
unite every part of the cortex with every other part, thus making it
possible for a neural activity going on in any particular center to
extend to any other center whatsoever. In the relatively unripe brain of
the child, the association fibers have not yet set up most of their
connections. The age at which memory begins is determined chiefly by
the development of a sufficient number of association fibers to bring
about recall. The more complex reasoning, which requires many different
associative connections, is impossible prior to the existence of
adequate neural development. It is this fact that makes it futile to
attempt to teach young children the more complicated processes of
arithmetic, grammar, or other subjects. They are not yet equipped with
the requisite brain machinery to grasp the necessary associations.

[Illustration: FIG. 18.--Diagrammatic scheme of association, in which V
stands for the visual, A for the auditory, G for the gustatory, M for
the motor, and T for the thought and feeling centers of the cortex.]

ASSOCIATION THE BASIS OF MEMORY.--Without the machinery and processes of
association we could have no memory. Let us see in a simple illustration
how association works in recall. Suppose you are passing an orchard and
see a tree loaded with tempting apples. You hesitate, then climb the
fence, pick an apple and eat it, hearing the owner's dog bark as you
leave the place. The accompanying diagram will illustrate roughly the
centers of the cortex which were involved in the act, and the
association fibers which connect them. (See Fig. 18.) Now let us see
how you may afterward remember the circumstance through association. Let
us suppose that a week later you are seated at your dining table, and
that you begin to eat an apple whose flavor reminds you of the one which
you plucked from the tree. From this start how may the entire
circumstance be recalled? Remember that the cortical centers connected
with the sight of the apple tree, with our thoughts about it, with our
movements in getting the apple, and with hearing the dog bark, were all
active together with the taste center, and hence tend to be thrown into
activity again from its activity. It is easy to see that we may (1) get
a visual image of the apple tree and its fruit from a current over the
gustatory-visual association fibers; (2) the thoughts, emotions, or
deliberations which we had on the former occasion may again recur to us
from a current over the gustatory-thought neurones; (3) we may get an
image of our movements in climbing the fence and picking the apple from
a current over the gustatory-motor fibers; or (4) we may get an auditory
image of the barking of the dog from a current over the
gustatory-auditory fibers. Indeed, we are _sure_ to get some one or more
of these unless the paths are blocked in some way, or our attention
leads off in some other direction.

FACTORS DETERMINING DIRECTION OF RECALL.--_Which_ of these we get first,
which of the images the taste percept calls to take its place as it
drops out of consciousness, will depend, other things being equal, on
which center was most keenly active in the original situation, and is at
the moment most permeable. If, at the time we were eating the stolen
fruit, our thoughts were keenly self-accusing for taking the apples
without permission, then the current will probably discharge through
the path gustatory-thought, and we shall recall these thoughts and their
accompanying feelings. But if it chances that the barking of the dog
frightened us badly, then more likely the discharge from the taste
center will be along the path gustatory-auditory, and we shall get the
auditory image of the dog's barking, which in turn may call up a visual
image of his savage appearance over the auditory-visual fibers. It is
clear, however, that, given any one of the elements of the entire
situation back, the rest are potentially possible to us, and any one may
serve as a "cue" to call up all the rest. Whether, given the starting
point, we get them all, depends solely on whether the paths are
sufficiently open between them for the current to discharge between
them, granting that the first experience made sufficient impression to
be retained.

Since this simple illustration may be made infinitely complex by means
of the millions of fibers which connect every center in the cortex with
every other center, and since, in passing from one experience to another
in the round of our daily activities, these various areas are all
involved in an endless chain of activities so intimately related that
each one can finally lead to all the others, we have here the machinery
both of retention and of recall--the mechanism by which our past may be
made to serve the present through being reproduced in the form of memory
images or ideas. Through this machinery we are unable to escape our
past, whether it be good or bad; for both the good and the bad alike are
brought back to us through its operations.

When the repetition of a series of acts has rendered habit secure, the
association is relatively certain. If I recite to you A-B-C-D, your
thought at once runs on to E, F, G. If I repeat, "Tell me not in
mournful numbers," association leads you to follow with "Life is but an
empty dream." Your neurone groups are accustomed to act in this way, so
the sequence follows. Memorizing anything from the multiplication table
to the most beautiful gems of poetic fervor consists, therefore, in the
setting up of the right associative connections in the brain.

ASSOCIATION IN THINKING.--All thinking proceeds by the discovery or
recognition of relations between the terms or objects of our thought.
The science of mathematics rests on the relations found to exist between
numbers and quantities. The principles and laws of natural science are
based on the relations established among the different forms of matter
and the energy that operates in this field. So also in the realm of
history, art, ethics, or any other field of human experience. Each fact
or event must be linked to other facts or events before it possesses
significance. Association therefore lies at the foundation of all
thinking, whether that of the original thinker who is creating our
sciences, planning and executing the events of history, evolving a
system of ethics, or whether one is only learning these fields as they
already exist by means of study. Other things being equal, he is the
best thinker who has his knowledge related part to part so that the
whole forms a unified and usable system.

ASSOCIATION AND ACTION.--Association plays an equally important part in
all our motor responses, the acts by which we carry on our daily lives,
do our work and our play, or whatever else may be necessary in meeting
and adapting ourselves to our environment. Some sensations are often
repeated, and demand practically the same response each time. In such
cases the associations soon become fixed, and the response certain and
automatic. For example, we sit at the table, and the response of eating
follows, with all its complex acts, as a matter of course. We lie down
in bed, and the response of sleep comes. We take our place at the piano,
and our fingers produce the accustomed music.

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