Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 76.djvu/86

82 and of showing how the memory, will, reason and imagination contribute in their functioning to the needs of the organism. Such expectations still lack something of fulfilment. Chapters on the imagination continue to give a large, perhaps undue, proportion of space to the discussion of imagery. Works on psychology that confess a disposition to make the functional their text are disappointing and inadequate in their treatment of the imagination. In this field we may confidently await fresh developments, as functional psychology, pushed far enough, should tend to bridge the chasm between a dry science of the states of consciousness as such and a vital knowledge of human nature.

A psychology genetic other than in name may enable us not merely to realize the part played by the imagination from the dawn of psychic life and its contribution to the physical and social adjustment of the individual, but also to trace the connection of this faculty—I venture to write the word without quotation marks—with the life-preserving and life-promoting emotions.

It would be rash to claim that recognition in the lower animals implies imagery and that consequently all progressive adjustments, such as form the criteria of intelligence, imply the exercise of imagination. In fact, the indefiniteness of our conception of our own images when we speak of gustatory and tactual imagery, and the increasingly impalpable nature of the conception as in comparative psychology we descend the animal scale, make apparent in this matter the futility of all dogmatism. But it seems certain that growth in intelligence is correlative with the breaking up of the total situation, to which the animal reacts, into disparate and independent images, which can be grouped and elaborated after the manner of, in judgments, the later concepts. This means the gradual displacement of association by contiguity through association by similarity, which culminates in the imaginative constructions of genius.

This development of the consciousness is naturally most marked where the need of adjustment is most imperative. At this point of vital interest the feelings also are naturally engaged, and consequently an intimate relation is to be expected between the imagination and the feelings. We need not pause now to consider the interdependence of the functioning of the imagination and the genesis of the emotions. If necessity is the mother of invention, fear, anger, sympathy, pride and love in their various guises bring it to birth. The inner connection between the emotion and the imagination seems to lie in the kinesthetic image or, as some might prefer to say, the kinesthetic sensation. Here the distinction between image and sensation is hard to make. Introspection reveals that all perception is accompanied by kinesthetic sensations from the eye, ear and other organs of sense. The corresponding visual, auditory and gustatory images have also a kinesthetic