What happens in constructive imagination is not so easy to say. Genius is defined sometimes as the capacity of doing great things without effort, and sometimes as the capacity of taking infinite pains; and constructive imagination, in the same way, is represented now as a native gift that finds rather than seeks expression, and now as a sort of skilled labour, a matter of planning and moulding and constructing. There is probably truth on both sides, and a degree of truth that varies with the individual make-up of the artist; in general, however, there is more hard work and less inspiration than is usually supposed. The poet or the inventor starts out with a more or less definite plan or aim or ambition; and the plan persists, if only as a nervous disposition, to determine the course of his ideas. It also helps to initiate the imaginative complex, the first clue to which seems in fact to come, at least ordinarily, as an inspiration, a happy thought; some external situation, or some grouping of the associative tendencies that is active at the moment, touches off the disposition, and the initial idea flashes into mind. Whether this first idea is crude or complete, and whether the stream of later ideas is broad or narrow, these things depend altogether upon circumstances. Now, at any rate, begins the stage of skilled labour; the idea is worked upon and worked over; the plan decides what shall be accepted, what rejected, what put aside for another trial; we are reminded of the course of recollection,—only that rejection, active as it is in memory, is still more to the fore in imagination, and construction is more critical than reconstruction. Here and there other happy thoughts may crop up; but in essentials this stage of hard work continues, until the idea attains its final expression in objective terms, in the words of the poem, for instance, or in the effective machine. Meantime, there have been all sorts of feelings. The imaginative ideas bring with them their own feeling of strangeness; but this may be overwhelmed by the joy of success or the irritation of failure; and these feelings may themselves alternate, swinging from extreme to extreme. Meantime, also, there have been all sorts of empathic experiences, which have formed about the focal processes, vivifying and personalising the partial products of the constructive effort; and they too find their natural term in the actual accomplishment of the imaginative task. Figurative, again, all this, and lamentably far from scientific accuracy,—but, in broad outline and on the average, we may hope that it is true to the psychological facts.
How, now, does the pattern of imagination compare with that of memory? We saw that the memory-pattern is that of discursive movement within fixed boundaries, the limits set by the fixity of the past occurrence which is remembered. Imagination, on the other hand, is a more or less steady flow, in a single direction, from the fountain-head of disposition; there are no limits of any kind, save those of individual capacity and experience; but the course is determined by the initial plan or ambition. Memory is discursive movement within fixed boundaries; imagination is progressive movement from a constant source. Memory is characterised by the feeling of familiarity and by imitative kinæsthesis; imagination by the feeling of strangeness and by empathy.
(1) Memory, like recognition, may be definite or indefinite, direct or indirect. Can you give instances from your own experience?
(2) Suppose that you were required to write a defence of cramming. Could you find materials in these two chapters?
(3) Memory fails as old age comes on; it decays, as we say, in old age; and the course of decay is well-marked and uniform. Can you give any account of it? And can you explain the course from statements made in these two chapters?
(4) Do you think that memory can be improved? Be sure, before you answer, that you have read a clear meaning into the question. Give reasons for your answer.
(5) It has been said that we have no memory, but only memories. In what sense or senses is this statement true?
(6) Memory has been described as a storehouse of ideas, as a power to revive perceptions, as a universal function of organic matter, and as decaying sense. Try to realise clearly what the users of these phrases had in mind; say what you can in their favour; show in what respects they are inadequate to the psychology of memory.