# How to Use Your Mind/Active Imagination

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CHAPTER V ACTIVE IMAGINATION
A very large part of the mental life of a student consists in the manipulation of images. By images we mean the revivals of things that have been impressed upon the senses. Call to mind for the moment your house-number as it appears upon the door of your home. In so doing you mentally reinstate something which has been impressed upon your senses many times; and you see it almost as clearly as if it were actually before you. The mental thing thus revived is called an image.
The word image is somewhat ill-chosen; for it usually signifies something connected with the eye, and implies that the stuff of mental images is entirely visual. The true fact of the matter is, we can image practically anything that we can sense. We may have tactual images of things ​Page:Harry Dexter Kitson - How to Use Your Mind, 2d ed. - (1921).djvu/81 ​Page:Harry Dexter Kitson - How to Use Your Mind, 2d ed. - (1921).djvu/82 ​(according to the literal meaning of the word, "to breathe in"), that some mysterious external force (called by the ancients, "A Muse") enters into the mind of the author with a special revelation.
Psychological analysis of these imaginative works shows that this explanation is untrue. That the bizarre and apparently novel products arise from the experiences of the author, revived in imagination and combined in new ways. The horrendous incidents depicted in Dante's "Divine Comedy" never occurred within the life-time experience of the author as such. Their separate elements did, however, and furnished the basis for Dante's clever combinations. The oft-heard saying that there is nothing new under the sun is psycho- logically true.
In the light of this brief analysis of products of the imagination we are ready to develop a program which we may follow in cultivating an active imagination.
Recognizing that images have their source in sensory experience, we see that ​Page:Harry Dexter Kitson - How to Use Your Mind, 2d ed. - (1921).djvu/84 ​auditory images more freely than they do other kinds. In order to develop skill in evoking the others, practise recalling them. Sit down for an hour of practice, as you would sit down for an hour of piano practice. Try to recall the taste of raisins, English walnuts; the smell of hyacinths, of witch-hazel; the rough touch of an orange-skin. Though you may at first have difficulty you will develop, with practice, a gratifying facility in recalling all varieties of images.
The third characteristic which we observed in works of the imagination is vividness. To achieve this, pay close attention to the details of your sensory experiences. Observe sharply the minute but characteristic items—the accent mark on après; the coarse stubby beard of the typical alley tough. Stock your mind with a wealth of such detailed impressions. Keep them alive by the kind of practice recommended in the preceding paragraph. Then describe the objects of your experience in terms of these significant details.
​Page:Harry Dexter Kitson - How to Use Your Mind, 2d ed. - (1921).djvu/86 ​Page:Harry Dexter Kitson - How to Use Your Mind, 2d ed. - (1921).djvu/87 ​number of varied and vivid experiences; storing them up in the mind in the form of images; and industriously recalling and combining them in novel relationships.
Mental images occur in other mental processes besides Imagination. They bulk importantly in memorizing, as we shall see in Chapters VI and VII; and in reasoning, as we shall see in Chapter IX. Throughout the book we shall find that as we develop ability to manipulate mental images, we shall increase the adaptability of all the mental processes.
READING AND EXERCISES
Reading: Dearborn (2) Chapter III.
Exercise 1. Call up in imagination the sound of your French instructor's voice as he says étudiant. Call up the appearance on the page of the conjugation of être, present tense.
Exercise 2. Choose some word which you have had difficulty in learning. Look at it attentively, securing a perfectly clear impression of it; then practise calling up the visual image of it, until you secure perfect reproduction.
Exercise 3. List the different images called up by the passage from Romeo and Juliet.