Who struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury
Signifying nothing.
I do not pretend to explain all the associations which led Shakespeare to think of these lines, but some few are obvious. “Dusty death” is suggested by Genesis iii. 19: “Dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return”. Having spoken of “lighting fools the way”, it is natural to think of a “candle”, and thence of a “walking shadow” being lighted by the candle along the way. From shadows to players was a well-established association in Shakespeare’s mind; thus in Midsummer Night’s Dream he says of players: “The best in this kind are but shadows, and the worst are no worse, if imagination amend them”. From a “poor player” to a “tale told by an idiot” is no very difficult transition for a theatre-manager; and “sound and fury” no doubt often formed part of the tales to which he had to listen in spite of their “signifying nothing”. If we knew more about Shakespeare, we could explain more of him in this sort of way.
Thus exceptional imaginative gifts appear to depend mainly upon associations that are unusual and have an emotional value owing to the fact that there is a certain uniform emotional tone about them. Many adjectives are suitable to death: in a mood quite different from Macbeth’s, it may be called “noble, puissant and mighty”. A Chancellor of the Exchequer, thinking of the Death Duties, might feel inclined to speak of “lucrative death”; nevertheless he would not, like Vaughan, speak of “dear, beauteous death”. Shakespeare also would not have spoken of death in such terms, for his view of it was pagan; he speaks of “that churl death”. So a man’s verbal associations may afford a key to his emotional reactions, for often what connects two words in his mind is the fact that they rouse similar emotions.
The absence of belief that accompanies imagination is a somewhat sophisticated product; it fails in sleep and in strong and emotional excitement. Children invent terrors for fun, and then begin to believe in them. The state of entertaining an idea without believing it is one involving some tension, which demands a certain level of intellectual development. It may be assumed that imagination, at first, always involved belief, as it still does in dreams. I am not concerned at the moment to define “belief”, but a criterion is influence on action. If I say “suppose there were a tiger outside your front door”, you will remain calm; but if I say, with such a manner as to command belief, “there is a tiger outside your front door”, you will stay at home, even if it involves missing your train to the office. This illustrates what I mean when I say that imagination, in its developed form, involves absence of belief. But this is not true of its primitive forms. And even a civilised adult, passing through a churchyard on a dark night, may feel fear if his imagination turns in the direction of ghosts.
When imagination passes into belief, it does not, as a rule, become a belief about the past. Generally we place the imagined object in the present, but not where it would be perceptible to our senses. If we place it in the past, it is because the past has some great emotional significance for us. If a person we love has been in great danger, and we do not know whether he has come through safely, imagination of his death may lead us to believe that he has been killed. And often imagination leads us to believe that something is going to happen. What is common to all such cases is the emotional interest: this first causes us to imagine an event, and then leads us to think that it has happened, is happening, or will happen, according to the circumstances. Hope and fear have this effect equally; wish-fulfilment and dread-fulfilment are equally sources of dreams and day-dreams. A great many beliefs have a source of this kind. But, in spite of psycho-analysis, there are a great many that have a more rational foundation. I believe that Columbus first crossed the ocean in 1492, though 1491 or 1493 would have suited me just as well. I cannot discover that there is any emotional element in this belief, or in the belief that Semipalatinsk is in Central Asia. The view that all our beliefs are irrational is perhaps somewhat overdone nowadays, though it is far more nearly true than the views that it has displaced.
We must now return to the subject of memory. Memory proper does not, like imagination, involve a re-arrangement of elements derived from past experience; on the contrary, it should restore such elements in the pattern in which they occurred. This is the vital difference between memory and imagination; belief, even belief involving reference to the past, may, as we have seen, be present in what is really imagination though it may not seem to be so to the person concerned. That being so, we still have to consider what constitutes the reference to the past, since the view tentatively suggested before we had considered imagination turns out to be inadequate.
There is one possible view, suggested, though not definitely adopted, by Dr. Broad in his chapter on “Memory” already referred to. According to this view, we have to start from temporal succession as perceived within what is called the “specious present”, i.e. a short period of time such that the events that occur throughout it can be perceived together. (I shall return to this subject presently.) For example, you can see a quick movement as a whole; you are not merely aware that the object was first in one place and then in another. You can see the movement of the second-hand of a watch, but not of the hour-hand or minute-hand. When you see a movement in this sense, you are aware that one part of it is earlier than another. Thus you acquire the idea “earlier”, and you can mean by “past” “earlier than this”, where “this” is what is actually happening. This is a logically possible theory, but it seems nevertheless somewhat difficult to believe. I do not know, however, of any easier theory, and I shall therefore adopt it provisionally while waiting for something better.