Healthy Brains

 To some people any talk about the importance of training the imagination of children through their toys, games and studies seems fantastic and trivial. They compare it to feeding them on sweetmeats; they think it means substituting story books for real life and encouraging the easy exercise of fancy for the careful study of fact.

But imagination is not a mere ornament to a life-work; it is rather one of its most valuable and necessary tools. If it did no more than sweeten and adorn the world, it would be well worth having, well worth making considerable sacrifices to attain. But it does more than this. It bears much fruit as well as flowers; fruit that, if it ripens in suitable weather, endures and can be used for the service of man.

There is a wonderful palm-tree, called the Tal or Palmyra palm, which in India and Ceylon supports six or seven millions of people, and “works” also in West Africa, where it is probably native. It gives its young shoots and unripe seeds as food; its trunk makes a whole boat, or a drum or a walking-stick, according to size; hats, mats, thread and baskets—in fact, almost all kinds of clothing and utensils—are made from the split and plaited leaves; gum comes from it, and certain medicines, jaggery sugar too and an intoxicating drink for those who desire it. In one of the museums at Kew—a wet day brings always something besides disappointment—there is a book made up of the very leaves of the palm, containing a Tamil poem enumerating more than eight hundred human uses to which this marvellous single plant can be put.

Now the imagination is like a Palmyra palm. We stand a long way off and, looking up, say “What a graceful tree! But what a pity it produces that intoxicating ‘toddy’ and nothing else!” Yet all the while food and clothing and shelter and travel and learning are all wrapped up in it, if only we were not too ignorant to guess, or too idle to seek.

We talk as if the poet and painter had need of imagination, but not the student, the doctor, the philanthropist, the business man, whereas none of these can do work at a really human standard without imagination that is living, penetrating, active and yet trained and disciplined.

A recent illuminating address to a body of students pointed out that Germany's immense industrial strides have been made possible by an education which draws men's minds out of narrow old grooves, and helps them to see and grasp wider possibilities. But the same speaker went on to point out that the English worker has far more real initiative and imagination than the German, and that in our own country we have not even to make elaborate plans for developing these qualities, but rather to release them in our administrators so far as to prevent actually checking them in the children now growing up.

Imagination in business, for instance, means new possibilities, fresh sources of supply and fresh markets to demand, economy of working and better adjustment of work to worker, so as to have less waste of our greatest capital, human time and power. America has taught us something in these respects; what we must do is to take what new light she has developed, while keeping our long-grown, well-earned skill which she has not had the chance to make.

In research work, again, we need perpetually the synthetic and constructive imagination if individual work is not to become narrowly specialised and shut off from other divergent or parallel lines which would illuminate it. The other day I was told of a great surgeon who not only has six or seven assistants to help him in his immediate tasks, but also, since he is too busy in the service of humanity to have time for reading, has eight trained assistants whose business it is to read in many languages what is being done all over the civilised world in his own line, and keep him informed as to the development of experience. A wonderful advance on the crystallisation of individual method, this, and yet it needed but the imaginative projection upon scientific work of what every business firm and every political unit has long done.

To transfer to our own concerns a method developed elsewhere is one of the most valuable services imagination can render. Almost all educational reform comes about thus, most mechanical inventions, a great part of economy and comfort in individual homes. Also, besides these particular advantages, the incessant coming and going between the different fields of activity, the circulation of attention which this use of the imagination involves, tends to vitalise and enrich not only the individuals who carry it out, but the whole social organism of which they form part.

Upon the moral side not much need be said. “Put yourself in his place” is a very old and respectable recipe for growing justice in one's conduct, consideration in one's speech, sympathy in one's heart. As employer or magistrate, as teacher or nurse, as customer or shopman, as parent or husband or child we must all deal somehow with our fellow-men: honestly and truthfully, we mean, kindly and helpfully, we hope. But is it not the more or the less of our imagination that makes such dealings possible? Without it, we are cruel because of something we do not feel, unjust because there is something we do not know, unwittingly deceitful because there is something we do not understand. With it, our justice will support, our kindness uplift, our attempt at help will not be barren, but will awake response and raise the whole level of our human intercourse into a region of higher possibilities.