The Forging of Passion Into Power (Paperback)

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 THE TRAINING OF THE IMAGINATION FOR learning the art of the orderly arrangement of thought, no previ6us ?wl?dge is necessary of logic or of any science whatever. What i necessary is a willingness on the part of the readers not to J-Csft but to aid the writer in furnishing their minds with simplt imagery, derived from various departments of human life, including science. The imagery will be used, not in order to prove any doctrine, but to facilitate the orderly arrangement of thought material. When we are trying to put our household goods in order, we find it useful to provide ourselves with convenient shelves, racks, and hooks on which to store them; when we are trying to put our thoughts in order, we find it advisable to fasten up in our memories a convenient framework of imagery on which we can register our thought-processes. Let us think of Time as a mass of water in a pool or tank. That is to say, Time Past is the water. Time Future shall be represented by the air above it. Water is continually coming slowly in at the top of the pool, and trickling away below into cavernous depths out of sight. The surface of the pool represents Time Present. Now let us represent the consciousness of an individual by a stick floating at the surface of the pool. On one end of the stick is written Emotion and Sensation; on the other, Action and Influence. Please get this idea fixed up in your mind, before you read any further. Little precautions of this kind go a great way towards conferring clearness of understanding and preventing fogginess and misapprehension of a writer's meaning. Get the vision fixed quite firmly; it is not a mere ornament, but a hook on which you are going, presently, to hang a weight, perhaps a heavy one. We have supposed the stic...