THE PRACTICAL USES OF THE IMAGINATION. [Reprinted from The Congregationalist, July, 1878.] THE realistic spirit of our age and country is accompanied by its own peculiar dangers. One of these dangers lies in the tendency to adopt very contracted views of "the useful" and "the practical." Men ask the question "Cui bono?" with the narrowest notions of what bonum is-sometimes, indeed, as if it ought to be translated "bread and butter"! They ask the question, "Is this practicable?" in utter oblivion of the fact that results which are indirect and remote are often the most worthy of achievement. They talk about "substantial" advantages, precisely when they are speaking of the things that "perish in the using." And another of the dangers incident to the practical temperament lies in the tendency to disparage the imaginative faculty, and to neglect its culture. Many business men are scarcely conscious that they possess such a faculty at all; far less do they assign it a due place in the economy of human life. They know that they have powers of perception, memory, and judgment; these they are using every day; but "imagination" surely pertains only to poets and artists, who write and paint and-starve ! The Now this, of course, is a great mistake. Imagination—in its widest sense-may be popularly defined as the image-making faculty of the human mind. It may be described as that power which the mind has of making and holding up before itself pictures, either of what lies simply in the memory, or of what is suggested in accordance with the laws of association, or of what is evolved through the deliberate process of comparison. This is virtually the view of Sir William Hamilton, who affirms that " representation-the vivid exhibition of an object-forms the principal constituent of imagination," and who endorses the remark of a French philosopher that "there are as many different kinds of imagination as there are different kinds of intellectual activity." The images which the mind thus holds up before itself may be of the most varied character. They may be pictures of sensations, or of ideas, or of volitions, or of emotions. They may also be either simple or composite. They may be simple photographs, as it were, of what we ourselves have actually seen and felt; or they may be compositions of the most complex character, which in their entireness are altogether new, or possibly even without any counterpart in nature, although composed of elements the most simple and familiar. Think, for example, what pictorial novelties, what peculiar combinations of persons, of scenes, and of circumstances, our imagination produces in our sleep! And when, in your waking moments, you are trying to represent to yourself how your friend John Smith would think or feel or speak or act, if he were placed in certain circumstances, you are virtually using that same faculty which, working along with other endowments, enabled Shakespeare to write his Julius Cæsar or his Hamlet. Of course, just as one man may be distinguished for his retentive memory, so another may be distinguished for his vivid and powerful imagination; but the pictorial, no less than the recording faculty, belongs naturally to every sound human mind, and is no less capable of development. The special purpose of the present paper is to commend the due cultivation of this faculty to men of practical temperament, by showing that its exercise enters as a factor into the production of the most important and practical results. I. We may begin by considering the power of the Imagination to increase personal comfort and happiness. Samuel Rogers used to tell how, at the time when plate-glass windows had just been introduced, he was dining in the house of a friend, and that, sitting at the table for an hour or two with his back to one of these windows, he was not only made very uncomfortable by imagining all the while that the window was wide open, but actually caught also a severe cold in consequence ! And, if we remember rightly, it was Sydney Smith who, on hearing the story, exclaimed that this was surely a very foolish use to make of such a powerful instrument; for that the same vividness of imagination, if wisely directed, might enable a man to sit in a draught with impunity! It is at least an indubitable fact that the imagination does often influence to a great extent our personal comfort and happiness. Everyone knows what a power this faculty may wield, either for good or evil, in certain states of disease, and the skilful physician often takes advantage of this fact in order to promote a cure. So subtle and intimate is the con nection between the mind and the body, that a right use of the imagination may have the most salutary effect even upon our physical condition. may be true that no one— 66 can hold fire in his hand Perhaps it but it is certainly true that martyrs at the stake have spoken of the flames as "a bed of roses," and that men have gone fasting for many an hour, when they have had "meat to eat" which others "knew not of." And it is also true that one man whose spirit is cheered by visions of the brain" may get more real nourishment for his body from a homely meal, than some other man from a sumptuous banquet to which he sits down with no other thought than the "practical" one of gratifying his appetite. For there are many men who miss their mark, just because their eye is too intently fixed upon it! How much personal discomfort, moreover, a man may often avoid, by imagining possible, or at least probable contingencies, instead of dashing forward recklessly to meet a future which he has never tried to image to his thought. How much enjoyment also is due to this same faculty, when we live over again in thought bright days that are gone, or picture in thought bright days that are to come. For "distance lends enchantment to the view" both of the past and of the future. It is quite proverbial how frequently the anticipation of happiness gives greater pleasure than even the reality. The past, too "will always win A glory from its being far; And orb into the perfect star We saw not, when we moved therein." Thus "the pleasures of memory" and the "pleasures of hope" are both, to a great extent, " pleasures of the imagination." We are all, further, familiar with the fact that the same external circumstances may assume very different aspects to different minds. To the two young souls under one umbrella, who are contemplating the same mental picture of a marriage-day not far distant, the storm of wind and rain through which they are walking is not at all the same thing that it is to the husband and wife whom they pass on the road, and who on the principle, perhaps, that "two are better than one "are each carrying their separate umbrella! Every lover is, more or less, a poet for the nonce. The real lies before him bathed in the light of the ideal. And can we say that the increase of happiness which is due to an imagination thus quickened by fresh affection is no practical advantage? Were such joy for sale in the world's markets, should we not see many a bank-note cheerfully paid down to buy it? Nor will it be denied that a very substantial increase of happiness flows also from the appreciation of the beautiful in nature and art. It has been well said that the eye only sees what it brings with it the power of seeing." Much depends on what sort of mind is behind the eye and on what sort of pictures are there. We remember a clever caricature representing a rising manufacturer "out" with his wife and daughters on his first visit to the Lake district. The manufacturer, sitting beside the coachman, asks, "And what water is |