Creative Imagination is more than mere memory. It takes the elements of the past as reproduced by memory and rearranges them. It forms new combinations out of the material of the past. It forms new combinations of ideas, emotions and their accompanying impulses to muscular activity, the elements of mental “complexes.” It recombines these elements into new and original mental pictures, the creations of the inventive mind.
Business and Financial Imagination
No particular profession or pursuit has a monopoly of creative imagination. It is not the exclusive property of the poet, the artist, the inventor, the philosopher. We tell you this because you have heard all your life of the poetic imagination, the artistic imagination, and so on, but it is rare indeed that you have heard mention of the business imagination.
The fact is no man can succeed in any pursuit unless he has a creative imagination. Without creative imagination the human race would still be living in caves. Without creative imagination there would be no ships, no engines, no automobiles, no corporations, no systems, no plans, no business. Nothing exists in all the world that had not a previous counterpart in the mind of him who designed it. And back of all is the creative mind of God.
How Wealth is Created
Mind is supreme. Mind shapes and controls matter. Every concrete thing in the world is the product of a thinking consciousness. The richly tinted canvas is the physical expression of the artist’s dream. The great factory, with its whirling mechanisms and glowing furnaces, is the material manifestation of the promoter’s financial imagination. The jeweled ornament, the book, the steamship, the office building, all are but concrete realizations of human thought molded out of formless matter.
Mind, finite and infinite, is eternally creative and creating in the organization of formless matter and material forces into concrete realities.
The Klamath Philosophy
Says Max Müller in his “Psychological Religion”: “The Klamaths, one of the Red Indian tribes, believe in a Supreme God whom they call ‘The Most Ancient One,’ ‘Our Old Father,’ or ‘The Old One on High.’ He is believed to have created the world—that is, to have made plants, animals and man. But when asked how the Old Father created the world, the Klamath philosopher replies: ‘By thinking and willing.’”
How Men Get Things