By means of the imagination we paint ideals of life and conduct, which hover before the mind in the hour of struggle and trial, luring us onward and upward, spurring us to greater effort, and giving to life added charms and glories. Without the power to imagine what is beyond the real, the workman sinks to the level of drudgery, and never rises to the plane of artistic production.
The imagination is very active in children. Watch their plays if you would see how they convert a stick into a horse, the play-house into a home, and mimic the drama of life in their games and contests. Their life is largely make-believe and thinking in images. This tendency to think in images can be utilized in the lessons in arithmetic, geometry, geography, and history. Without the combination of images into new forms and products, the pupil cannot think the thoughts peculiar to these branches. For instance, the lesson in geography starts with what the child has seen or can see at home, and proceeds to that which is away from home, using pictures, drawings, lantern-slides, and vivid descriptions to aid the imagination in picturing scenery, cities, countries, and forms of life in other parts of the globe. It may be a question what the mind should think in connection with the symbols and truths of that science. The form of a continent is without doubt best conceived as given on a map. For many practical purposes, cities may be thought as mere starting-points and halting-places in a journey. Many a river is for mature minds a winding black line on colored surfaces called maps. Nevertheless, if geography means for a pupil no more than this, it will be dry and uninteresting indeed. Out of the images of things observed the mind should be led to construct images of what it has not seen. These images are never an adequate picture of the foreign city or country, even after they have been supplemented or modified by visits to museums, conservatories, and zoological gardens, by excursions to the field, the forest, and the factory, or even by travel at home and abroad. The thoughts of a country that one has journeyed through, or lived in for a time, consist partly of images and partly of symbolic representations. Since thinking in images is easier for beginners than thinking in symbols, the instruction in geography should begin with child-life at home, with the things on the breakfast-table, with the garments worn and the means of transportation used, and proceed from these to the life, the home, the dress, and the sports of children living in other lands and other climes. The lessons in geography make constant appeals to the imagination, and call for thinking in images or mental-pictures in connection with map-symbols and the discussions of causes and laws.