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bestowing a bow upon one, a smile upon another, asks a short question of a third, while a fourth is honored with a particular conference; and the greater part have no particular mark of attention, but go as they came. It is true he can give no mark of his attention to those who were not there, but he has a sufficient number for making a choice and a distinction." If those who were treated so coolly had at once left, while those upon whom the great man smiled had stayed till some of their friends and relatives whom they themselves summoned because of their kind treatment. were honored at their expense, the case would exactly illustrate the influence that we exert, whenever we choose, over the character of the images that throng through our minds. Those that we do not attend

to, vanish; those that we do attend to, stay until we neglect them for the sake of those that come into our minds through their connection with them.

But sometimes the will abdicates, and lets one's thoughts take their own course. As the rider of a trusty horse might throw the reins on his neck, and let him wander at will across fields, through woods, over meadows, so we sometimes give full rein to our thoughts, and let them take us where they will. If we break in upon any such state for the purpose of making a study of it, I think that we shall usually find that the images in our minds are the products of constructive imagination- sometimes very grotesque ones.

Difference between Reproductive and Constructive Imagination. To learn whether any particular image, or combination of images, is the product of reproductive or constructive imagination, all we have to do is to learn

whether or not it is a copy of a past experience. Our memories, of course, are defective, and we may be uncertain on that account; but, apart from that, we need be in no doubt whatever.

Applying this test, it is evident that when we learn anything from a book or from a friend we are exercising the constructive imagination. Reading is sometimes defined as thinking along prescribed lines; and if we carefully examine our own minds, we shall see that all thinking is done, for the most part, through images, either of things or words. When, then, we read, we form and combine images in a certain prescribed way—in the way prescribed by the language of the author-provided we understand him. When we listen to the conversation of a friend, we evidently do the same thing. Unless, therefore, our friend or book says precisely what we ourselves have thought, and in precisely the same way, it is evident that we grasp the thoughts by means of the constructive imagination.

When we find out a thing for ourselves, by the exercise of our own powers the only other way in which we can learn anything — I think we shall see that is done through constructive imagination. A boy has a problem in arithmetic to solve. What is the first thing for him to do? Understand it, as we say; and this, we have just seen, he can only do through constructive imagination. When he clearly grasps the conditions stated in the problem, he asks what follows from them. He reasons that such and such a result would follow which result is likewise imaged constructively, and so on to the end. Kepler wanted to know the shape of the path which the planets make in their journeys round the sun. He made guess after guess, each time comparing his guess with the facts,

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until finally he was successful. This again was accomplished through the constructive imagination, was it not? Only by means of the constructive imagination could he form any sort of an idea of any particular planet, and each guess was an imaging of this planet pursuing a course that he had never seen it take. A child of one or two or three years listens daily to conversations between his mamma and papa. Sometimes consciously — always consciously or unconsciously — he is trying to understand them. How does he succeed in learning the meaning of so many words? Precisely, for the most part, as Kepler discovered the shape of the planetary orbits by making a successful hypothesis. By the time he is three he knows how to use words that apply to purely mental processes-such as know, think, believe, understand. He thinks of forms an image of certain mental facts which he remembers in connection with certain words - brings images into a relation in which he has never experienced them, until he gets the right pair together until he makes a successful hypothesis. Sometimes we can catch him in the very act of constructively ascertaining the meaning of a word. When a child of two speaks of the "skin of a book" through an act of inductive reasoning, he has concluded that the outside of everything is its skin — and this conclusion, to be a conclusion at all, must be imaged in part in his mind.

Evidently, therefore, the constructive imagination is not monopolized by poets and painters and novelists. Whoever reads, whoever listens to a conversation intelligently, whoever thinks — imagines, and imagines constructively. "There are indeed as many different kinds" or rather cases "of imagination as there are kinds of intellectual activity."

QUESTIONS ON THE TEXT.

1. Define imagination, image, percept.

2. What does a complete act of memory involve?

3. State and illustrate the difference between imagination and

memory.

4. Illustrate the differences in the imagination of different people. 5. State and explain the quotation from Dr. Reid.

6. What is active imagination? Passive?

7. What is the difference between reproductive and constructive imagination?

8. How do we read a book intelligently, or understand a conversation?

9. How does a child come to learn the meaning of words?

SUGGESTIVE QUESTIONS.

1. What makes possible the difference between the active and passive imagination?

2. Give examples of cases in which children used words incorrectly, although reasoning in the same way as they did when they used other words correctly.

3. Compare the imagination of children with that of older people, and explain the difference.

LESSON XXVIII.

IMAGINATION.

(Continued.)

Scope of Constructive Imagination.

In the last lesson we saw that the imagination of popular thought differs widely from the imagination of which Psychology treats. When people in ordinary conversation speak of imagination, they mean a kind of constructive imagination—the kind that poets, painters, novelists, and musicians possess in an unusually high degree - the power of combining ideas or images furnished by reproductive imagination into new wholes, without having received suggestions as to the combinations from any one else. But it is now plain that we, who understand the poems, paintings, and novels that are the product of the constructive imagination, exercise constructive imagination. It does, indeed, require a higher power of it to combine images and groups of images originally than to do so under guidance, so much higher that some writers would give it another name and call it the creative imagination. But if we adopt their name we need to remember that the creative imagination of a Shakespeare, a Beethoven, a Thackeray, a Raphael, does not differ in kind from that of the child who imagines himself becoming a bird.