To one whose auditory imagery is meager, the following lines will lose something of their beauty:
How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank!
Here we will sit and let the sounds of music
Creep in our ears; soft stillness and the night
Become the touches of sweet harmony.
Note how much clear images will add to Browning's words:
Are there not two moments in the adventure of a diver—one when a beggar he prepares to plunge, and one, when a prince he rises with his pearl?
Points Where Images Are of Greatest Service.—Beyond question, many images come flooding into our minds which are irrelevant and of no service in our thinking. No one has failed to note many such. Further, we undoubtedly do much of our best thinking with few or no images present. Yet we need images. Where, then, are they most needed? Images are needed wherever the percepts which they represent would be of service. Whatever one could better understand or enjoy or appreciate by seeing it, hearing it, or perceiving it through some other sense, he can better understand, enjoy or appreciate through images than by means of ideas only.
5. THE CULTIVATION OF IMAGERY
Images Depend on Sensory Stimuli.—The power of imaging can be cultivated the same as any other ability.
In the first place, we may put down as an absolute requisite such an environment of sensory stimuli as will tempt every sense to be awake and at its best, that we may be led into a large acquaintance with the objects of our material environment. No one's stock of sensory images is greater than the sum total of his sensory experiences. No one ever has images of sights, or sounds, or tastes, or smells which he has never experienced.
Likewise, he must have had the fullest and freest possible liberty in motor activities. For not only is the motor act itself made possible through the office of imagery, but the motor act clarifies and makes useful the images. The boy who has actually made a table, or a desk, or a box has ever afterward a different and a better image of one of these objects than before; so also when he has owned and ridden a bicycle, his image of this machine will have a different significance from that of the image founded upon the visual perception alone of the wheel he longingly looked at through the store window or in the other boy's dooryard.
The Influence of Frequent Recall.—But sensory experiences and motor responses alone are not enough, though they are the basis of good imagery. There must be frequent recall. The sunset may have been never so brilliant, and the music never so entrancing; but if they are never thought of and dwelt upon after they were first experienced, little will remain of them after a very short time. It is by repeating them often in experience through imagery that they become fixed, so that they stand ready to do our bidding when we need next to use them.