CHAPTER II
THE TRAINING OF THE IMAGINATION
For learning the art of the orderly arrangement of thought, no previous knowledge is necessary of logic or of any science whatever. What is necessary is a willingness on the part of the readers not to resist but to aid the writer in furnishing their minds with simple imagery, derived from various departments of human life, including science.
The imagery will be used, not in order to prove any doctrine, but to facilitate the orderly arrangement of thought material. When we are trying to put our household goods in order, we find it useful to provide ourselves with convenient shelves, racks, and hooks on which to store them; when we are trying to put our thoughts in order, we find it advisable to fasten up in our memories a convenient framework of imagery on which we can register our thought-processes.
Let us think of Time as a mass of water in a pool or tank. That is to say, Time Past is the water. Time Future shall be represented by the air above it. Water is continually coming slowly in at the top of the pool, and trickling away below into cavernous depths out of sight.
The surface of the pool represents Time Present.
Now let us represent the consciousness of an individual by a stick floating at the surface of the pool. On one end of the stick is written “Emotion and Sensation”; on the other, “Action and Influence.”
Please get this idea fixed up in your mind, before you read any further. Little precautions of this kind go a great way towards conferring clearness of understanding and preventing fogginess and misapprehension of a writer’s meaning. Get the vision fixed quite firmly; it is not a mere ornament, but a hook on which you are going, presently, to hang a weight, perhaps a heavy one.
We have supposed the stick lying flat on the surface of the water. As long as it does so, it represents a consciousness lying wholly in the present time.
Doctors and other teachers sometimes tell us very glibly that sanity and health, and all that deserves to be called “normal,” consist in being “adapted to one’s environment”; all which is not so they call “abnormal.” This mode of speaking is capable of being interpreted in two senses. As usually understood, it is very false, misleading the utterers even more than the hearers—as indeed slip-shod phrases of doubtful meaning usually do.
Let us look at our mind-picture of the floating stick.
As long as it lies horizontal it represents what we may call the commonplace condition of the consciousness, which is what some people really mean when they use such words as “sanity” and “health.”
The most commonplace consciousness wabbles slightly up and down at times; so that one end dips a little way back, or down, into the Past, and the other a little way forward, or up, into the Future.
But there are other conditions of consciousness besides the commonplace ones:—genius, asceticism, insanity, idiocy, criminal tendency, melancholy, suicidal mania, all that is eccentric, abnormal, or out of line with the commonplace average proceedings of the age in which the individual lives. All of these can be represented by a more serious tilting of the stick; or by its being bent, or half broken, so that both ends dip at once into the Past, or one half may dip into the Past and the other still be in the Present.
What does all this prove? Nothing whatever. What is it leading up to? I do not know. What is the use of it all? That all depends on the use which you may choose to make of it. I have provided the entrance-hall of your house of thought with a rack, such as my experience has shown me is of convenient form for arranging things on. At present, our business is to see that the rack is in proper order and well fixed up. Exercise your imagination at your leisure, in picturing—or, as it is sometimes called, visualising—the floating stick. Shut your eyes and see it—first in one condition, then another. See it stiff and straight, then bent; then half broken. Picture it always with its labels on: at one end “Emotion and Sensation,” at the other “Action and Influence.” Picture it, first with one end dipping down, then the other; then bent so that both ends dip; with the emotion end floating, then the other end. Go on with this exercise till the slightest exertion of your will suffices to put clearly before your mental vision a picture of the stick in any condition or position that you think of.
Now, the problem of forging Passion into Power is that of changing any position of the stick which represents a condition of the consciousness that is not commonplace and that is undesirable, into some position which represents a desirable one. Which positions represent undesirable states and which desirable ones, we shall see as we go on. For the present, the business on hand is to familiarise your imagination with the stick in all its possible positions.