Chapter 18.  Imagination

Sensations, once experienced, modify the nervous organism, so that copies of them arise again in the mind after the original outward stimulus is gone. No mental copy, however, can arise in the mind, of any kind of sensation which has never been directly excited from without.

The blind may dream of sights, the deaf of sounds, for years after they have lost their vision or hearing; [52] but the man born deaf can never be made to imagine what sound is like, nor can the man born blind ever have a mental vision. In Locke's words, already quoted,"the mind can frame unto itself no one new simple idea." The originals of them all must have been given from without. Fantasy, or Imagination, are the names given to the faculty of reproducing copies of originals once felt. The imagination is called 'reproductive' when the copies are literal; productive' when elements from different originals are recombined so as to make new wholes.

After-images belong to sensation rather than to imagination; so that the most immediate phenomena of imagination would seem to be those tardier images (due to what the Germans call Sinnesgedächtniss) which were spoken of in Vol. 1, p. 647, -- coercive hauntings of the mind by echoes of unusual experiences for hours after the latter have taken place. The phenomena ordinarily ascribed to imagination, however, are those mental pictures of possible sensible [p. 45] experiences, to which the ordinary processes of associative thought give rise.

When represented with surroundings concrete enough to constitute a date, these pictures, when they revive, form recollection. We have already studied the machinery of recollection in Chapter XVI. When the mental pictures are of data freely combined, and reproducing no past combination exactly, we have acts of imagination properly so called.

OUR IMAGES ARE USUALLY VAGUE.

For the ordinary 'analytic' psychology, each sensibly, discernible element of the object imagined is represented by its own separate idea, and the total object, is imagined by a 'cluster' or 'gang' of ideas. We have seen abundant reason to reject this view (see p. 276 ff.). An imagined object, however complex, is at any one moment thought in one idea, which is aware of all its qualities together. If I slip into the ordinary way of talking, and speak of various ideas 'combining,' the reader will understand that this is only for popularity and convenience, and he will not construe it into a concession to the atomistic theory in psychology.

Hume was the hero of the atomistic theory. Not only were ideas copies of original impressions made on the sense-organs, but they were, according to him, completely adequate copies, and were all so separate from each other as to possess no manner of connection. Hume proves ideas m the imagination to be completely adequate copies, not y appeal to observation, but by a priori reasoning, as follows:

"The mind cannot form any notion of quantity or quality, without forming a precise notion of the degrees of each," for" 'tis confessed that no object can appear to the senses, or in other words, that no impression [53] can become present to the mind, without being determined in its degrees both of quantity and quality. The confusion in which impressions are sometimes involved proceeds only from their faintness and unsteadiness, not from any capacity in the mind to receive any impression, which in its real existence has no particular degree nor proportion. That is a contradiction in terms; and even implies the flattest [p. 46] of all contradictions, viz., that 'tis possible for the same thing both to be and not to be. Now since all ideas are derived from impressions, and are nothing but copies and representations of them, whatever is

true of the one must be acknowledged concerning the other. Impressions and ideas differ only in their strength and vivacity. The foregoing conclusion is not founded on any particular degree of vivacity. It cannot therefore be affected by any variation in that particular. An idea is a weaker impression; and as a strong impression must necessarily have a determinate quantity and quality, the case must be the same with its copy or representative." [54]

The slightest introspective glance will show to anyone the falsity of this opinion. Hume surely had images of his own works without seeing distinctly every word and letter upon the pages which floated before his mind's eye. His dictum is therefore an exquisite example of the way in which a man will be blinded by a priori theories to the most flagrant facts. It is a rather remarkable thing, too, that the psychologists of Hume's own empiricist school have, as a rule, been more guilty of this blindness than their opponents. The fundamental facts of consciousness have been, on the whole, more accurately reported by the spiritualistic writers. None of Hume's pupils, so far as I know, until Taine and Huxley, ever took the pains to contradict the opinion of their master. Prof. Huxley in his brilliant little work on Hume set the matter straight in the following words:

"When complex impressions or complex ideas are reproduced as memories, it is probable that the copies never give all the details of the originals with perfect accuracy, and it is certain that they rarely do so. No one possesses a memory so good, that if he has only once observed a natural object, a second inspection does not show him something that he has forgotten. Almost all, if not all, our memories are therefore sketches, rather than portraits, of the originals -- the salient features are obvious, while the subordinate characters are obscure or unrepresented.

"Now, when several complex impressions which are more or less different from one another -- let us say that out of ten impressions in each, six are the same in all, and four are different from all the rest -- are successively presented to the mind, it is easy to see what must be the nature of the result. The repetition of the six similar impressions will strengthen the six corresponding elements of the complex idea, [p. 47] which will therefore acquire greater vividness; while the four differing impressions of each will not only acquire no