Universal ideas surcharged with feeling help to create the crowd-atmosphere.  Examples:  liberty, character, righteousness, courage, fraternity, altruism, country, and national heroes.  George Cohan was making psychology practical and profitable when he introduced the flag and flag-songs into his musical comedies.  Cromwell’s regiments prayed before the battle and went into the fight singing hymns.  The French corps, singing the Marseillaise in 1914, charged the Germans as one man.  Such unifying devices arouse the feelings, make soldiers fanatical mobs—­and, alas, more efficient murderers.

FOOTNOTES: 

[Footnote 28:  Sesame and Lilies.]

CHAPTER XXVI

RIDING THE WINGED HORSE

   To think, and to feel, constitute the two grand divisions of men
   of genius—­the men of reasoning and the men of imagination.

   —­ISAAC DISRAELI, Literary Character of Men of Genius.

    And as imagination bodies forth
    The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen
    Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing
    A local habitation and a name.

—­SHAKESPEARE, Midsummer-Night’s Dream.

It is common, among those who deal chiefly with life’s practicalities, to think of imagination as having little value in comparison with direct thinking.  They smile with tolerance when Emerson says that “Science does not know its debt to the imagination,” for these are the words of a speculative essayist, a philosopher, a poet.  But when Napoleon—­the indomitable welder of empires—­declares that “The human race is governed by its imagination,” the authoritative word commands their respect.

Be it remembered, the faculty of forming mental images is as efficient a cog as may be found in the whole mind-machine.  True, it must fit into that other vital cog, pure thought, but when it does so it may be questioned which is the more productive of important results for the happiness and well-being of man.  This should become more apparent as we go on.

I. WHAT IS IMAGINATION?

Let us not seek for a definition, for a score of varying ones may be found, but let us grasp this fact:  By imagination we mean either the faculty or the process of forming mental images.

The subject-matter of imagination may be really existent in nature, or not at all real, or a combination of both; it may be physical or spiritual, or both—­the mental image is at once the most lawless and the most law-abiding child that has ever been born of the mind.

First of all, as its name suggests, the process of imagination—­for we are thinking of it now as a process rather than as a faculty—­is memory at work.  Therefore we must consider it primarily as

1.  Reproductive Imagination