large and usable _stock of images_
from all fields of perception. It is not enough to have visual images
alone or chiefly, for many a time shall we need to build structures
involving all the other senses and the motor activities as well. This
means that we must have a first-hand contact with just as large an
environment as possible--large in the world of Nature with all her
varied forms suited to appeal to every avenue of sense; large in our
contact with people in all phases of experience, laughing with those who
laugh and weeping with those who weep; large in contact with books, the
interpreters of the men and events of the past. We must not only let all
these kinds of environment drift in upon us as they may chance to do,
but we must deliberately _seek_ to increase our stock of experience;
for, after all, experience lies at the bottom of imagination as of every
other mental process. And not only must we thus put ourselves in the way
of acquiring new experience, but we must by recall and reconstruction,
as we saw in an earlier discussion, keep our imagery fresh and usable.
For whatever serves to improve our images, at the same time is bettering
the very foundation of imagination.

WE MUST NOT FAIL TO BUILD.--In the second place, we must not fail _to
build_. For it is futile to gather a large supply of images if we let
the material lie unused. How many people there are who put in all their
time gathering material for their structure, and never take time to do
the building! They look and listen and read, and are so fully occupied
in absorbing the immediately present that they have no time to see the
wider significance of the things with which they deal. They are like the
students who are too busy studying to have time to think. They are so
taken up with receiving that they never perform the higher act of
combining. They are the plodding fact gatherers, many of them doing good
service, collecting material which the seer and the philosopher, with
their constructive power, build together into the greater wholes which
make our systems of thought. They are the ones who fondly think that, by
reading books full of wild tales and impossible plots, they are training
their imagination. For them, sober history, no matter how heroic or
tragic in its quiet movements, is too tame. They have not the patience
to read solid and thoughtful literature, and works of science and
philosophy are a bore. These are the persons who put in all thei