Many stories are told because of their “beauty” of form, where the content is not true. Some such stories are valuable because of the standardizing sentiments they carry, but truth is as important at least as the æsthetic. The human intellect evolved to interpret meanings and progressively perfect behavior adjustments. Each age of racial experience brings on its new interpretations, and broadly, each age makes advances upon that which preceded. Old theories fall, new truths arise; but old theories hold sway over the imagination of the masses long after the leaders have accepted higher truths because the old is well told while the new lacks the poetic expression of the artist. Literature is well-told information, yet under the guise of literature goblins and superstitions and worn-out theories parade in the imagination and thus mold ideals and behavior.
The problem of the professional story-teller of the future is to tell the best information of the age in as fascinating a form as the old myths and fables are now told after years of repetition. Only in this way can contemporary popular opinion be kept abreast of the scientific truth of the time, instead of dragging along in the superstitions of the past.
Some stories are told though untrue, because they “develop the imagination,” but this by itself is a dangerous criterion. The function of the imagination is to reconstruct the world in mental terms which will guide behavior. The functioning of the imagination in any kind of images will develop “power,” but the power may be detrimental individually and socially if the images cause crooked thinking. Straight thinking depends on the imagination—on the kind of emotionalized images which habitually arise in any thought situation or problem. Just so far as stories are untrue and without great moral value, yet are fascinatingly told, so far do they encourage untrue imagining and emotional attitudes, and therefore untrue thinking. And inasmuch as the emotional response to the single interpretative concept, the single vision of life, is vastly stronger through tradition than the interest in the discovery of complex relationships,—and truth comes finally only through the latter,—the emotionalized habits of imagination in interpretation are profoundly important for democracy.