The great tears sprang to their meeting eyes
For the heart must speak when the lips are dumb;
And under the silent evening skies
Together they followed the cattle home.
Some thoughts are not images.
Who can fully appreciate these stanzas without picturing the landscape of clover, blue-eyed grass, meadow bars, river lane, cows moving homeward, and especially the boy with the shadow on his face, the two older brothers lying dead under the feet of the trampling foe? The subsequent parts of the poem lend themselves to the activity of the imagination, to a play of sympathy for the father seemingly bereft of all his sons, until on a summer day cool and late he sees fluttering in the wind an empty sleeve of army blue, beneath a face that he knew,—a scene which, if constructed by the imagination, cannot help stirring the emotional life of the reader and giving him proper tones and inflections in oral reading while more fully realizing the price paid in war for the saving of the nation. Very much of our thinking does not turn on images or mental pictures. We do not primarily think justice, law, kindness, mercy under the form of images, though by a secondary process we can throw these ideas into concrete examples and image them as occurring in life. Very many ideas cannot be made concrete in that way, as, for example, the ideas of infinity, eternity. Sometimes an indistinct or faded image does duty for the idea of horses in general, but in such cases the image is representative of the idea, and should not be confounded with the idea. Both are thoughts, but not all thoughts are ideas or images. Many thoughts are propositions and cannot be imaged at all.
Putting content into words.
The images which go with words grow in fulness as one’s experience enlarges. Take the word fire. The first idea was formed from fire in the stove and in the smithy. A fuller idea resulted from the sight of a distant mountain on fire. Then a distant conflagration resulting in the loss of a block of town property gave the word still fuller content. Finally, the destruction of the State Capitol, in which part of the manuscript of a book, other valuable papers and records were destroyed, and in which one or two friends almost lost their lives, gave a meaning to the word fire which it never had before. Without doubt it hampers the mind and impedes the logical processes of thought if the word invariably calls up the idea of these fires with the accompanying emotions.
Books on mathematics and other sciences.
We saw the value of the labor-saving devices introduced by the symbols and formulas of mathematics and other sciences. Analysts carry forward long trains of thought by means of symbols whose meaning can be, but is not always, called up with the successive links of the chain of reasoning. In adding a column of figures, in solving an algebraic equation, in reading a work on higher mathematics or logic, in thinking the formulas of chemistry, physics, astronomy, etc., and in dealing with objects, forces, and relations which have been accurately and definitely quantified, the thinking may be carried forward by the use of symbols which can be interpreted and applied whenever the occasion requires, but whose meaning is not always present to the mind. In reading of things which have not been quantified, the stream of thought often flows on without images, or mental pictures, or copies of sensations. Nevertheless, the examination of any school reader or book of selections from the best literature will show how our best writers and orators appeal to the imagination, and to what a large field the method of thinking in images or mental pictures is applicable for the purpose of securing due appreciation of good literature and proper expression in oral reading.