PERSONAL POWER (Complete 12 Volume Edition). William Walker Atkinson
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or warclub, empirically discovered, gave him his first idea of the principle of the lever. The use of the rude sail developed the idea of the windmill; the rolling log in the water suggested the waterwheel to him—the waterwheel, first employed to grind grain, afterward was used to saw wood, lift heavy materials, move great hammers. From these rude applications of natural power, he gradually developed the higher and more complex forms now in common use. The use of the horse and the ox to pull trees and logs, itself an adaptation, gradually evolved into the use of these animals to pull chariots and wagons; these in turn were the beginnings of the motorvehicles of today.
Ribot says: “Every invention, great and small, before becoming a fixed and realized thing, was first an imagined idea, a mere contrivance of the brain, an assembly of new combinations or new relations. In inventions, man has imagined to a great extent. By the very law of the complexity of inventions, all inventions are found to be grafted upon one another. In all the useful arts, improvements have been so slow, and so gradually wrought, that each one of them passed unperceived, without leaving its author the credit for its discovery. The immense majority of inventions are anonymous—some great names alone survive. But, whether individual or collective, Imagination remains Imagination. In order that the plow, at first a single piece of wood hardened by the fire and pushed along by human hand, should become what it is today, through a long series of modifications described in special works, who knows how many imaginations have labored! In the same way, the uncertain flame of a resinous branch, guided vaguely in the night, leads us through a long series of inventions to gas and electric lighting. All objects, even the most ordinary and now common, that now serve in our ordinary, everyday life, are ‘condensed Imagination’.”
One is impressed by the striking analogy between the processes of Invention, as just described, and the processes of “grafting” in horticulture. Horticultural “grafting” is defined as: “The process of taking a shoot or scion cut from one tree or shrub, and inserting it in a vigorous stock of its own or a closely allied species, so as to cause them to unite, and thus to cause the graft to derive a larger supply of nutritive power than it could otherwise obtain.”
By reference to the history of any invention—we have given actual illustrations of several—you will see that the new ideaimage always is grafted upon the stock of some older ideaimage. The new contrivance is the graft of a new contrivance upon an earlier contrivance either of Nature or of Man. Nature also is seen to proceed in the same way in her processes of Creative Evolution.
Bergson tells us that “Creation” and “Evolution” are but two names for the same universal creative process: all Creation is Evolution and all Evolution is Creation. He says: “A great creative process is in progress, sweeping everything along in its course. The actual present is all existence gathered up in this creative process. The past is also gathered up into it, exists in it, is carried along in it, as it presses forward toward the future. It is an unceasing becoming, which preserves the past and creates the future. It is Creative Evolution—a process in which Past, Present, and Future are involved.”
Psychologists and philosophers alike are in agreement concerning the fundamental fact that even the highest forms of Constructive Imagination are dependent upon the raw materials of reproduced senseexperiences; and that Constructive Imagination can build only with these materials, for it has no others with which to build. But this fact has been overemphasized—in some cases to even such an extent that the term “creative” has been tacitly denied to even the highest activities of the Constructive Imagination. This particular view is too often presented as “the whole truth,” the other half of which must be supplied in order to perfect the whole. We ask you to consider the following statements expressing and illustrating the opposing viewpoints; for we wish you to perceive the truth in both of its aspects, and thus see the thing as it is.
Thought from the first of these two respective viewpoints furnishes the report that even the most efficient Constructive Imagination is “tied to the stake of perception by a cord of greater or less strength.” In this view, the Imagination is held to be entirely dependent for its working materials upon the perceptions arising from senseexperience. Those holding to this view argue that, because of this fact, the Imagination is not truly a “creative” power; that, inasmuch as it does not create its own materials, and must draw its materials from outside of its own realm, it does not truly “create,” but merely “puts together,” in more or less new combination, the materials which it obtains from without. Say these reasoners, the Imagination is entirely dependent upon outside materials for its constructive work; it is limited to the materials obtained through the experience of its owner, or those of others.
These thinkers point out that the Imagination is like a builder who uses the material of a disorderly pile of bricks in order to build a fine house; or like the watchmaker who puts together the numerous parts of the intricate timekeeper; or like the artisan who; employing masses of metal, makes an engine, a sewing machine, a bicycle. Carrying this idea to its logical conclusion, we may say (as one writer points out) that: “Thus a painting is a mere combination of forms and colors; an oratorio, of sounds; an epic poem, of words or ideas previously existing in the mind. The elements of a poem like ‘Paradise Lost’—its streams, flowers, angels and deities—were all in the mind of the poet before he began to write, and all that Imagination did was to combine them into one harmonious whole.” In short, in this view, Imagination is merely the power of combination—it does not include the true creative element; its materials are previously existent—all that Imagination does it to put them together.
Thought from the second viewpoint furnishes a somewhat different report—its argument being more or less of the nature of what in legal procedure is known as a “demurrer.” A “demurrer” (in plain language) asks the question: “Well, even admitting that what you say is so—what of it? The “demurrer” asks judgment on this point: whether the matter alleged by the opposite party, even assuming it to be true, is sufficient in law to sustain the action or the defense, as the case may be.
Say this set of reasoners: We admit that the Imagination does not “create something out of nothing”; and that its creative work is performed by combining, arranging, adapting, or weaving the raw materials furnished by perception, apperception and experience. But is this not true of all other kinds of creative work of which the human mind has any knowledge? Does the human mind know of anything having been “made from nothing?” Can it form a conception of any such happening? Is not the term “creative” a statement of the act of puttingtogether, combining, manufacturing, making, composing, constituting “something from other things”? If this be so—and it is beyond question true—then the opposing side is merely quibbling over the meaning of a word and are not dealing with facts!
These thinkers say further: The opposite side has told but a halftruth—not the whole truth; that which is withheld is as important as that which has been stated. Every work of art, every process of reasoning, every product of hand, brain, reason, imagination, or their combinations, is a composition, a joining, a fusing, a welding, a puttingtogether. Sounds are combined in music; words are combined in a poem; colors are combined in a painting; but do sounds, words, and colors alone make these productions works of art? Shakespeare’s immortal works are, in this view, but aggregations of letters of the alphabet; but did Shakespeare play no part in the creation—was he not a creator of his works? The omitted portion of the truth is this: It is not alone the materials employed in the construction, but also the manner in which these materials are combined, arranged, and put together, that constitutes the creation. As a writer has said: “This power of ideal conception which uses these dead elements to express its living ideals, is the work of the Constructive Imagination!”
Brooks gives us the essence and spirit of this second viewpoint, in the following able statement made many years ago:
“Imagination can combine objects of sense into new forms, but it can do more than this. The objects of sense, in most cases, are merely the materials with which Imagination works. Imagination is a plastic power, moulding the things of sense into new forms to express its ideals; and it is these ideals that constitute the real products of Imagination. The objects of the material world are to it like clay in the hands of the potter; it shapes them into forms according to its own ideals of grace and beauty. He