What tricks imagination plays! Thus, if we expect a person in the street we transform a dozen impossible people into him while they are still too far off to be seen distinctly; and when we expect to hear a footstep on the stairs—as, we will say, the postman’s—we hear footsteps in every sound. Imagination will make us see a billiard hall as likely to travel farther than it will travel, if we hope that it will do so. It will make us think we feel a train begin to move as soon as the guard has said “All right,” though the train has not yet begun to move if another train alongside begins to move exactly at this juncture, there is no man who will not be deceived. And we omit as much as we insert. We often do not notice that a man has grown a beard.
iv
I read once of a man who was cured of a dangerous illness by eating his doctor’s prescription which he understood was the medicine itself. So William Sefton Moorhouse [in New Zealand] imagined he was being converted to Christianity by reading Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, which he had got by mistake for Butler’s Analogy, on the recommendation of a friend. But it puzzled him a good deal.
v
At Ivy Hatch, while we were getting our beer in the inner parlour, there was a confused mêlée of voices in the bar, amid which I distinguished a voice saying:
“Imagination will do any bloody thing almost.”
I was writing Life and Habit at the time and was much tempted to put this passage in. Nothing truer has ever been said about imagination. Then the voice was heard addressing the barman and saying:
“I suppose you wouldn’t trust me with a quart of beer, would you?”
Inexperience
Kant says that all our knowledge is founded on experience. But each new small increment of knowledge is not so founded, and our whole knowledge is made up of the accumulation of these small new increments not one of which is founded upon experience. Our knowledge, then, is founded not on experience but on inexperience; for where there is no novelty, that is to say no inexperience, there is no increment in experience. Our knowledge is really founded upon something which we do not know, but it is converted into experience by memory.