Then another thing to note about these pictures is the way in which they are related to one another. We may have a passive or an active attitude toward the show that is going on. When you are in a passive condition, you know how oddly these pictures come on, what an absurd relation sometimes they have to one another. They seem to have no logical connection whatever. Some pictures always appear together, although they may have no connection except that they were originally associated in that way, and you can never get one of them without the other turning up. It is amusing, sometimes grotesque, sometimes absurd, the way these pictures are grouped. Some come in what we call a logical series; that is, they have some connection with one another, one brings up another, and you go through the series from one point to another. Oh, how promiscuously these pictures come on the screen of the mind, some without the slightest premonition of their coming. It is fascinating to recall the process by which one picture suggested another, and that one a third. At times the spectator within us takes control and says, "I won't have that picture any longer, I will have another." He has the power to summon pictures. There lies the control. If there be in this world anything like self-control, that self-control is in the control of mental imagery. That control is the secret of personality. In terms of mental imagery can we define the individual and his power over himself, for mental pictures control our lives. Habit is merely a mental picture which has become automatic. Just because you can do the thing although you are conscious of the picture no longer, it does not mean that that image was not there once. When I want you to do something, I tell you to do it. If I have authority over you I put the picture of that act in your mind and I hold it there until it has worked itself out in conduct. Of course, I should not go about it in that way, with you, as an association of librarians. Not at all. I should attempt it in quite another way. I should sneak the picture into your mind by what we call indirect suggestion. If you were somebody I could browbeat into doing what I told you to do, I could order you to do it. In other words, I could jam the picture right into your mind, hold it there and say, "Now, you do that thing." But, with you, I couldn't do it that way. But I think I could manage some of you at any rate. When you were not watching, I should slip the picture into your mind. You wouldn't know where it came from. It would come on naturally. You would think you thought of it yourself. That is the gentle art of suggestion, to slip a picture on the screen of a person's mind without letting him know how it got there. He naturally, then, supposes it is the result of those deceptive processes which he identifies with personal thinking. You cannot cram ideas down the throat of a free-born American citizen. Of course, you can't. Moreover, what is the use of cramming them down his throat when you can squirt them into him with a psychological hypodermic? That is the charming thing about suggestion. All control, then, is control through mental imagery. You have had this experience, for example. As you stood in a railroad station and a locomotive came thundering in, you have had, for a moment, an impulse—not only an impulse,—you have had the picture in your mind of throwing yourself under the locomotive. From a casual inspection of the company I should suppose that none had tried that experiment as yet. Why? Because you were able to remove that picture from your mind and substitute for it another—a picture of the presumable appearance of things in a very short time after you had made the experiment, or the vista of a long and happy life stretching out before you, or of obligations to family and friends. Any one of these pictures will serve the purpose. But if the time ever comes when that picture of going under that locomotive gets firmly fixed in your mind, nothing except physical force from without can prevent your going under the wheels. Every motor idea that comes into our minds tends to work itself out into action. That is the secret of the hypnotic sleep, in which the person who is under your control, through pictures produced in his mind, automatically carries these things out into action. Mental imagery is the secret of life, and control of mental imagery means the control of mankind. Self-control is the control of one's own imagery.
The personality, the self, is revealed in this imagery and in the attitude of the spectator within us. You know those different attitudes. There are some pictures that come upon the screen of your mind, and the spectator within you is immediately interested. For example, here comes a picture on the screen of your mind of the day when that board that you had been working with so long, that unintelligent board, that board made up of reactionary people that you had so long been nursing, came to the point where you were able to tell them of that scheme of yours which must inevitably, logically and remorselessly lead to putting the library in your community on a modern basis. When the picture of your triumph on that occasion comes upon the screen of your mind, the spectator within you claps her hands and says: "You were very clever about that; you waited a long time, you worked it skillfully, you certainly are a capable person." You all get pictures of that kind. You can't help looking at them. Here is another slide—a reception. Of course, when they said that yours was an extremely becoming gown, you were quite delighted; and you talked well; you did say a lot of brilliant things. To be sure they were not original—nobody expects that—but you were very fortunate in your anthology that afternoon. I can see by the broad and amiable smiles all of you are wearing, that pictures of a similarly agreeable kind are by suggestion appearing on the screens of your minds.
But you have pictures of a very different sort. How could you?—of course, you were just from the library school, it was only your first position, but, at the same time, how could you?—you cannot imagine how you could have mistaken Sir Thomas More, in the sixteenth, for Thomas Moore in the nineteenth century. How could you have done it? Yet you did. When that picture comes on the screen of your mind the spectator within you shrinks and says: "Why must we look at that? Take it off at once." It would be very piquant if I could take other illustrations from your own experience, but I cannot do that. I shall have to take one out of mine. I have a number which my spectator dislikes. Here is a recent one:
At our experimental farm we have a very beautiful new saddle horse. As I pretend to be something of a rider I went to ride this horse. There was a sort of celebration that afternoon, and I thought it would be pleasant for the president of the University to ride one of these blooded horses to give eclat to the affair. I went out and rode this mare about. Everything went well until I encountered several traction engines in active operation and a number of automobiles. I was in a very narrow place. There being almost no other direction for the mare to go, she began to take a vertical course. She was in good condition and rather rotund, and the laws of physics worked out their inevitable result. At forty-five degrees I held on admirably. At sixty-five degrees, I began to feel some little distress. At eighty degrees I looked behind me, and at 89½ degrees I slid off. Now, such is the admirable press organization in the great state of Minnesota that every newspaper, I think, in the commonwealth—I haven't found one yet that skipped the item—called attention to the fact that the president of the University had come a cropper—or, if not strictly a cropper, the effect of it was the same. One of the papers was kind enough to say that, being an expert rider, I landed on my feet. If I did, my fundamental ideas of anatomy have been entirely erroneous. As I have been traveling about the state in the last few weeks, I haven't met a man, woman or child who has not sooner or later worked that back-sliding into the conversation. This is a picture of which, when it comes on the screen of my mind, the spectator within me says, "I suppose we have got to stand this, but it is certainly getting to be slightly tiresome." We all get slides of that sort in our collection.
Then there are pictures of another sort, beautiful pictures, inspiring pictures, yet for some reason the spectator within us is left cold and unaffected by these images. It is the very tragedy of human nature that we may intellectually know beautiful, noble, inspiring things, may have uplifting visions, and yet the spectator within us may look at these things and never so much as feel a flutter of the pulse. We do not incorporate ideas until these things have become not only a part of our intellectual apprehension, but until they have become a part of our emotional nature, until we make them into the very fabric of ourselves. We define the self, therefore, in terms of mental pictures, and the control of self is the control of mental pictures. Let me know the pictures to which you constantly revert, let me know the pictures that come steadily to the screen of your mind, let me know the pictures that the spectator within you gloats over and feels a loyalty to, and I will reveal to you your character. Whatsoever a man thinketh in his heart, whatsoever pictures he makes his own, whatsoever pictures he gloats over with joy and satisfaction, these things reveal the true personality.
Consider another thing: the content of these pictures, the kind of pictures. How are they determined? They are determined by our social relationships. Do you think the same sort of pictures are in the mind of the Englishman as are in the mind of the American? Do you think the same kind of pictures come into the mind of the Frenchman as come into the mind of the German? There are certain universal pictures, the same for all educated people, but most pictures take on a group character. What are the pictures that come into your minds as librarians? Pictures of your active calling. These pictures are very definite. You have your own phrases, your own language. These phrases and these forms of speech are themselves the labels of mental imagery. Every social group is held together by its phrases. Oh, how we love these phrases and how glibly we repeat them! So too, college professors have their own phrases. What a sesquipedalian terminology it is with which they bewilder the lay mind and overpower the student! How would lawyers get on but for their monopoly of archaic forms of speech? Think of the doctors' terminations, so many of them fatal, in itis, which they have invented in the last few years. So every social group determines very largely the conduct of its members by cleverly putting into their minds the imagery that it wishes to have carried out. Why do you dress as you do? Do your clothes represent your individual taste? In some measure, but for the most part you dress as you do because society puts fashion pictures into your heads. You ladies dress as you do because these fashion plates and the women you see upon the street leave a deposit in your mind, a composite picture, and that composite picture works itself out in your own charming and becoming wardrobe. To be sure, as librarians, you have individuality; as librarians, you have a certain personal distinction, but it is, after all, only a variation upon the common modes which you share with all your sisters everywhere. These standards, these ideals, these types, that we talk about are put into our minds by the social groups of which we are members, and we are to a very large extent dominated by these pictures. Do you doubt it? Just examine your mental imagery. How much of that mental imagery have you secured as a result of your own first hand experience? How much of that mental imagery represents original thinking? How much of that psychic panorama have you received ready-made from the society to which you belong?
The pictures come quickly upon the screen of the mind. How readily they are summoned by suggestion! If I had time I could bore you almost to extinction by calling up in your minds images that are common to all of us. We all have large collections of slides. The depressing fact is that for the most part they are identical. How refreshing it is to meet an original person. Who is the original person? Just the person that has some slides that were made at home. Most of us have the same old, tiresome slides. When we have to make conversation, what do we do? Go to the pigeon-hole, take out a slide, put it into our minds and then reflect it to our friends. We have to be able to talk on a great variety of subjects. In the nature of things we could not think out these things for ourselves. Society has provided the slides. There they are, like a well-organized collection, a card catalog, with a topical index. To suppose that we make the slides ourselves is a grateful illusion. There may be a few who do, but most of us get ours from the stock houses in New York and Chicago.
Was there ever a time when pictorial imagery was presented to the public as in these days? These are the days when people's minds are filled with visual imagery as never before in the history of mankind. And never before was the same imagery spread over so wide an area. Think, for example, of what cartoons do. Cartoons are a substitute for thinking. Cartoons are ready-made slides. Cartoons are arguments ready to serve. Cartoons demand no intellectual effort. They would not be successful as cartoons if they did. A cartoon which you have to analyze is in the nature of things a mistake and a disappointment. A cartoon tells the story instantly. It is a slide put into the minds of millions of people in a single week. Then consider the imagery sent out by the illustrated magazines. There is only one magazine, I think, now, that does not have illustrations. Some of us take it just for that reason. It has a kind of distinction on that account. The Atlantic Monthly has no illustrations except in the advertising pages—some of those are very good—but it has that sense of uniqueness, that kind of snobbishness, which is appreciated even in a democracy like our glorious democracy, where we are all free and equal, as contrasted with the social distinctions of this monarchy under which we are so hospitably received this evening. It is a mistake to suppose that the visual is suggested merely by drawings and photographs. When we go to a lecture on "Mother, Home and Heaven" we expect the speaker in lieu of lantern slides to supply "word pictures." The Sunday supplement is the absolute symbol of our state of mind.
As we haven't time to think—i. e., to make our own slides—naturally we haven't time to bring our collection together to see whether it is consistent. We are going about with a most extraordinary selection of slides. The only reason we get along with peace of mind is that we do not take our slides out of the different boxes at the same time. You keep your religious slides in one box, your moral slides in another, your business slides in another, your professional slides in another—and never take anything out of two pigeon-holes at once. For that reason you go through life without knowing what an extraordinary collection of hopelessly contradictory and mutually destructive ideas you are carrying about under that hat of yours. It is only by keeping these things in their boxes that we have anything like peace of mind. A few people, of course, are constantly going through their boxes, sifting, reorganizing and unifying their collections. These are the men and women who think, who have courage, and for the most part they represent genuine leadership. But most of us are satisfied to get our slides ready made, to get them in quantities and to have them remain a most heterogeneous accumulation.
There is a vast popular demand for ready-made slides. In every possible way these substitutes for thought are being sent out. Political slides are industriously distributed. You notice the difficulty that you have just now in talking about the political situation in our glorious country. We do not yet know what to say. You see, the slides haven't yet been sent out for this week. We have to wait until the slide makers put them on the market. We are all waiting to know what to say; we are all waiting for a new set of slides which shall be adjusted to the new conditions. If you bring out that old slide about the Republican party that saved the country—No! You don't want to say anything about that. You see at once, even though it has saved the country for years—you can see that that slide won't do. It is cracked.