Page:Psychology and preaching.djvu/47

 MENTAL IMAGES 29

More than once has the writer heard harsh judgments passed upon preachers by the hard-headed but not neces sarily the hard-hearted hearers who did not understand the psychology of public speaking. Such hearers, therefore, sometimes attribute to the preacher deliberate carelessness as to the truth a charge which in some instances may not be altogether undeserved. But if the great majority of preachers may on scientific grounds be acquitted cf the charge of the deliberate perversion of the truth in such cases, they should not be excused from the duty of under standing the psychological processes involved and of avoid ing the abuses which discredit both their message and their personal integrity. &quot; That man lies,&quot; said a sturdy, hon est man to me, after he had heard an impassioned evange list tell some remarkable stories without any apparent con sciousness that he was straining the credulity of his audi ence. Truth may be stranger than fiction, but that fact hardly gives currency as actual facts to stories that bear the obvious evidences of having been shaped up for the occa sion.

III. These mental images are our intellectual stock-in- trade. They are, so to speak, the materials of mental life. It is maintained by some psychologists that it is possible to think without images ; but it is an open issue in psychology, and opinions as to the question should not be dogmatically ex pressed. It is a question of fact and cannot be determined on a priori grounds. The presumption, however, seems to me to be clearly against the contention, and the arguments for it seem far from conclusive. A process of thinking may take place without any images of the things of the original experience appearing definitely in consciousness ; but a care ful scrutiny of consciousness in such cases will doubtless discover that there are images of some sort present per haps faint traces of images in which the original experi ence is representatively present; or if not, images at least of words with the accompanying &quot; feeling &quot; that they can at will be translated into the distinct images of the experience ;

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