THE IMAGINATION.1

BY A. P. MARBLE.

The subject to which attention is here invited may seem, from the title, to be some metaphysical or psychological discussion in the realm of the abstract and the comparatively unknowable, but such is not my purpose. I hope to keep within the limits of what may be seen in the school-room daily by every intelligent teacher, and to confine myself to what we all know, leaving speculation and psychology to people better able to deal with such themes. But in teaching we have to do with the mind; and the mental faculties are connected with the body so intimately that the two must always be together;— we know very little about disembodied spirits. In reflecting about that upon which we as teachers ought chiefly to work,-the mind,— we must of necessity consider it in its different manifestations, as the memory, the judgment, etc.

Object-teaching,-objective teaching, as some call it,-hasformany years engrossed the attention. Everybody feels sure of getting the public ear if he emphasizes what he has to say by labeling it "Object-teaching." Number must be studied by the beginner with blocks and marks, by tangible objects or visible things only. Geography must begin with a map of the pupil's desk or a table; and then go step by step to the map of the room, the school-yard, the neighborhood, the town, and so on; and not content with maps and pictures, we invent the relief-map, which shows the elevations and depressions of the land; and we even build little hills and mountains of sand on a blue table to represent the water; and astronomy has been taught, the planetary system at least, by representing the sun, the center of the system,-by a bright and fair-haired girl, perhaps; and the planets revolving about the sun by boys of different sizes, all walking around the central figure in orbits greater or smaller; and certainly the attractive force, in such a device, is well illustrated.

Now all this object-teaching, as a protest against the dull memorizing of facts, which are not at all comprehended by the pupil, is a move in the right direction, and too much cannot be said in its praise. It is the substitution of real things for empty words. It is teaching

1 An address delivered before the Worcester County (Mass.) Teachers' Association, at Gardner, near Mt. Wachusett.

instead of cramming. It is the awakening of live interest for dead drudgery with the forms of things which possess no sort of interest for the pupil. So far object-teaching should be practiced; it ought to be commended; but it should not be worshiped as the all-in-all, After saying the above, and with all that has been said and all that it implies fully in mind,-for it must not be supposed by any possible misconstruction of the words that anything here said is in opposition to object-teaching,-with all this in mind, let me say that there in a point in the training of a child where object-teaching, strictly followed, becomes a serious hindrance, and where it ought, partially at least, to be abandoned. It may even become an intolerable nuisance. It may be so used,-I am sure it often is so used,-as to obstruct the child's real progress and cramp his mental growth, as a tree is deformed by growing in the crevice of a ledge or crowded between two great rocks.

The real purpose of object-teaching is to fix the attention upon solid facts; to cultivate the perceptive faculties, the power of observation, or whatever we may call it, and then through this, and higher and above and beyond it all, to develop the reason and the mental powers. It is of comparatively little use for a child to perceive if he does not make some rational use of his perception. A dumb creature can perceive. A pet cat can see better than a child; the dog has a much better sense of smell, and his hearing is more acute than the child's. There is something in the child, however, which these interesting creatures have not. It is this something which we wish to cultivate. If we allow the object-teaching to stop short of developing this higher faculty of the child, we leave him inferior to the cat and the dog in those faculties which we have been cultivating; and if we perpetually and incessantly hammer away at the doors of the senses, in other words, if we have nothing but object-teaching,—we fail to reach the holy of holies of the child's mind, that higher being, distinct from the intelligent brutes; and it is possible for us to surround the senses with such a heap of the rubbish of material things that the mind within is imprisoned as with adamantine walls, when we ought to have opened the door that the spirit may go free. It is in this case that the object-teaching will have become a nuisance, a delusion, and a snare.

What made those great men, Abraham Lincoln and James A. Garfield? It was not object-teaching in any technical or exaggerated sense. It was the contact of a fresh and intelligent mind with the real things of nature, and something more, thought, reflection, self-communion. It was the few facts worked over in the mind.

Hence, Abraham Lincoln, reading his Bible and Shakespeare by the light of a pine-knot, became more of a man than he would have be come with all the books, full of all the "ologies" and the best of modern teachers, if those teachers were to fill up the time with neverending talk, talk, talk, and book, book, book, leaving no time for the boy to think.

It is this something which the boy may have, and which the dog and the cat have not, to which I wish to direct your thought, and for want of any better name we will call it the Imagination; and to the development of this higher faculty, and only so far as it tends to this development, is object-teaching valuable. Yet, I fear, we often stop short of this end, and lose sight of the aim in the pursuit,-in other words, object-teaching often becomes an end in itself, and not a means to an end. If so, it is an arrant humbug!

Imagination is, I suppose, the making of pictures in the mind. As contrasted with memory, it is the combining of images in the mind in a new form. We remember to have seen the head and horns of a cow in their appropriate place upon the animal herself; we may imagine this same head upon the body of a horse, though we have never seen one so placed. Similar rearrangements we may make of the ideas we have, which are not derived from material objects. In the illustration above, the creature of the imagination is grotesque,an impossible animal, so far as we know, in this neighborhood; but, on visiting a menagerie, we may see the horned horse, which is something like the creature of our imagination. The creation of the mind, however, is no more real because we afterward happen to find some created thing to correspond with it; nor are these creations of the imagination any the less real because the corresponding objects are never afterward discovered. The grotesqueness is not at all a necessary quality of the creations of the imagination; it is not more fre quently found in the product of the imagination than it is found in nature. We occasionally find abortions, deformities, malformations in nature, but these are the exceptions and not the rule. In the prod ucts of the imagination the grotesque is likewise the exception and not the rule.

It is necessary for me still further to define the meaning of the term "imagination"; for, as frequently used, the term means only that which is unreal, unsubstantial, and without foundation. The

1, Righteousness and Peace have kissed each other." Thisis figurative language, personification, and all of the imagination except the act, which is a pleasant memory. "Perfect Love casteth out Fear." If these instances do not show the correctness of my statement, the "Fourth dimension" of solids, which some person has imagined, must.

word is often used to denote mere fancy, the vague and ill-defined shapes that flit across the field of the mental vision like the shadows of fleecy clouds across the landscape. In this sense the word is a symbol of the unreliable, and hence the word has come to have a doubtful meaning. This is not the sense in which the word is here used. When you stand before a highly polished mirror, O my beautiful friends, there you are a corporeal existence,-with flesh and bones and blooming cheeks, and flashing eyes beaming with intelligence,— and fashionable and well-fitting clothes, let us hope. There is also an image of yourself in the mirror, if the lights are turned on. This image cannot be touched, nor heard, nor tasted, nor smelt; but it can be seen. It is not material,-except as the particles of light are material,—but it can be seen; and in this sense it is just as real as the body itself which causes the image. So the products of the imagi. nation are to the mind as real as this image is to the eye. Imagination, then, as a faculty of the mind, is not less concerned about realities than memory or any other mental faculty; it is not less a reality. than the sensations or mental states that are produced by external objects through the organs of sense.

Again, there is the poetic imagination, which has to do with sentiment, emotion, feeling. We more frequently use the word in this sense, perhaps. It is hardly necessary to say that this is not what I mean; for this has to do with the artistic,-with the beautiful creations of a poetic fancy, as displayed in verse and song; with the conceptions of a fine literary taste, or the great works of painters and sculptors.

The imagination which I am talking about is a much more common-place, a much more universal, and a far more useful and indispensable affair. The imagination, as I use the term, in its broader. significance, is a faculty just as common as the memory; it is not less useful than the memory: for in all mental activity it must be brought into play; without it there can be no real mental growth. More than any other mental faculty, it distinguishes man from the brute creation; for a horse remembers, for example, that certain acts of his result in pain inflicted by the whip of his master; and reason, which is sometimes called the distinguishing trait of human beings, cannot be carried on without the aid of the imagination. In the syllogism, which is the simplest form of reasoning, we derive a conclusion from two premises. For example: all birds have feathers; this animal is a bird; therefore this animal must have had feathers. Here the conclusion is derived from the premises; but before it was thus derived, the maker of the syllogism must have anticipated the

conclusion by an act of the imagination; he must have projected his mind forward beyond the facts then before his mind to a conclusion not yet reached,—just as a temporary bridge is thrown forward across the stream in advance of the permanent structure, by means of which alone the permanent bridge can be built. The imagination, then, is made use of even in reasoning. In this broader sense there is nothing which we do, mentally, without the aid of the imagination. I am here talking to you; you sit there and listen patiently. Many of us were never in this room before; but we all came here, mentally, before we took the train this morning. It appeared to me, in a vision of the mind, after the program was published, that here would be, perhaps, a pulpit and a lecture-platform in front, on which I should stand; that a patient and respectful audience of teachers and a few curious individuals of the town,-curious to see what these teachers have to say to one another,-would be before me; that the president would introduce me in a few well-chosen and commendatory words; and then that I should stand up, clear my throat, take a sip of water, and begin.

I saw that some people would come hoping to hear the interesting papers on arithmetic,-papers having an existence only in the imagination; for those prepared for last June were read elsewhere, and were not available for this meeting; and that after hearing a few words of the paper on that abstract subject, the Imagination, they would quietly steal away. I was here, you see, yesterday; and you were here also, in the same sense, or you would not be here to-day ; for, when you read the announcement of the meeting, and the conditions on which you could come, you made the journey in imagination, to see whether it would pay to put in a bodily appearance. Those who had attended such conventions before came to a place almost precisely like this; others visited a place somewhat different, but just as real to their minds. You all liked what you then saw that you were to meet, and so you are here. Others in their imaginary visit, and they all made a visit to Gardner, consciously or unconsciously,-others found that the imaginary cold dinner which they ate from an imaginary basket, in an imaginary hall, notwithstanding imaginary hot coffee was passed around by beautiful and benevolent imaginary ladies of Gardner, young or older, that this cold dinner and the fatigue incident to sitting in the inaginary vestry of the Congregational Church, and working so hard to listen to the speakers whom they heard,—the real speakers do not tire you, of course, saw, as I was saying, that this fatigue and the cold dinner, and, perhaps, indifference to the whole thing, gave them a tremendous