Of the Power of Imagination

A strong imagination produces the event, says the common saying, and I am one of those who feel very much the impression of imagination. Everyone is jolted by its blow, but some are overthrown by it. Its effect upon me is so piercing that I have undertaken to avoid it rather than resist it, and I live far more by its influence than by my own reason. I knew a man who could not dine if he heard others moaning and coughing at table. And I knew another who had to be told nothing unpleasant after dinner, lest it ruin his digestion. Both of these things seem ridiculous, and yet the body that honored these demands was not ridiculous — it was simply obedient to the mind that governed it.

The doctors take useful advantage of this credulity. They use pills and potions that by their color, smell, and texture have no natural effect whatsoever, yet work perfectly well when the patient believes they will. I have heard of whole towns swept by the conviction of an epidemic that did not exist — and they fell sick nonetheless, with real symptoms, real fevers, real deaths. The imagination is not, in this, pretending. It is genuinely commanding the body to be ill.

“We shiver, we tremble, we turn pale and red at the blows of imagination; lying in our feather beds we feel our bodies agitated by its impulse, sometimes even to the point of expiring. And boiling youth, fast asleep, feels itself so warm in dream as to satisfy in sleep bodily desires.”

And then there is the matter of impotence produced by imagination — which I will not dwell on except to note that nothing illustrates more clearly the power of the mind over the flesh. There are men entirely sound in body who have failed, not from any physical incapacity, but because they expected to fail. The expectation was the cause. The body did exactly what the mind predicted it would do, not because the prediction was sound, but because it was believed.

What this instructs us, I think, is that the war between reason and imagination is far less even than reason likes to believe. Reason can construct excellent arguments for why we should not be afraid of a shadow, should not feel sick at a meal, should not be conquered by a thought. Imagination does not argue back. It simply acts. And acting, it wins.