PRACTICAL PSYCHOLOGY

Otago Daily Times, Issue 23886, 14 August 1939, Page 16

PRACTICAL PSYCHOLOGY

"Is Your Imagination Working for You" was the subject discussed last Thursday evening at the Practical Psychology Club. It was pointed out that the imagination was ths creative faculty of the mind. It was not to be found below the stage of the human, and it enabled a man's progress in growth to be accelerated to a remarkable degree. It consisted of a recombination of mental elements which resulted in the mahing of a fresh picture or idea. Imagination differed from memory in which events were merely reproduced. Animals could remember and reproducs, but were unable to recombine the remembered matter and were therefore limited to the repitition of actual facts. If man desired to advance in the scale of life, the imagination needed to be kept vitally alive. All inventive and creative work of the mind was performed by this faculty, and under proper control it led to advancement and devalopment. A child could as a rule picture and imagine things with a vividness of which the adult was rarely capable. Frequently children were unable to distinguish between strict fact and the pictures of the imagination, and thus the dividing line .between truth and fiction was slight. In such cases the child might easily earn the undeserved reputation of being untruthful. The adult also experienced at times the same inability to distinguish between impressions from external events and those from within. This early freedom of ideas was rapidly extinguished by habit and routine and inertia won as against activity. So, imagination which might have led one into new fields and filled life with adventure and variety gradually perished. Few people had as much as begun to explore the resources of mind and imagination where so much awaited discovery. To the involuntary use of the imagination, without purnose or control, could be applied the term day-dreaming. It was a mild form of mental intoxication which tended to weaken the will and to render infirm the purposive faculties of the mind. To dream of accomplishments was so much easier than the attempt to make them come true. But the imagination Droperly controlled, by experience and reflection, becams one of the noblest attributes of man. Memory, it was stated, recorded everything entertained in the mind and graduallv built it into character which in turn determined one's conduct. So that, as Shakespeare remarked, " The fault is not in our stars, but in ourselves that we are underlings."