Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II ORIGIN OF IMAGINATION Every mental image or representation contains certain motor elements. The thought of a peach, or of any other pleasant fruit makes the mouth water. The remembrance of a catching air impels us to sing. The recollection of a beautiful scene, makes us gaze fixedly into the distance. Such movements are mere repetitions. They are organic. Yet in them we have an incipient form of imagination. What hinders the images from becoming creative in the fullest sense that is to say— not merely re-productive but productive ? Nothing hinders this except lack of persistence and energy on the part of the image. When we are ill and enfeebled, and our power of resistance lowered, an image may easily become creative in a high degree. By thinking of a pain we may begin to feel it! Listening for robbers we may hear them—that is, we may have illusions, become the victims of our own active mind images. But the creative power of mind images does not reach its highest development in mere illusion. The school of Charcot has established the fact that profound changes may take place in the organism, as the result of a mind picture or image. The once " miraculous " stories of Stigmata—the mark of nails in the flesh, and the presence of bleeding wounds in the bodies of saints are now well authenticated. Indeed the creative powerof the Saints is allied in one respect to that of every great genius—moral and otherwise—inasmuch as they furnish an illustration of the power of mental images, the motor elements of which have become creative. To leave the world of the miraculous and return to the peach, the recollection of which makes the mouth water ! Here we have reproduction pure and simple—that is, memory plus a reflex movement. This is an inferior form of imagination and is...