Miracles - C. S. Lewis [34]
In order to explain this I must now touch on a subject which has an importance quite apart from our present purpose and of which everyone who wishes to think clearly should make himself master as soon as he possibly can. And he ought to begin by reading Mr Owen Barfield’s Poetic Diction and Mr Edwyn Bevan’s Symbolism and Belief. But for the present argument it will be enough to leave the deeper problems on one side and proceed in a ‘popular’ and unambitious manner.
When I think about London I usually see a mental picture of Euston Station. But when I think (as I do) that London has several million inhabitants, I do not mean that there are several million images of people contained in my image of Euston Station. Nor do I mean that several millions of real people live in the real Euston Station. In fact though I have the image while I am thinking about London, what I think or say is not about that image, and would be manifest nonsense if it were. It makes sense because it is not about my own mental pictures but about the real London, outside my imagination, of which no one can have an adequate mental picture at all. Or again, when we say that the Sun is ninety-odd million miles away, we understand perfectly clearly what we mean by this number; we can divide and multiply it by other numbers and we can work out how long it would take to travel that distance at any given speed. But this clear thinking is accompanied by imagining which is ludicrously false to what we know that the reality must be.
To think, then, is one thing, and to imagine is another. What we think or say can be, and usually is, quite different from what we imagine or picture; and what we mean may be true when the mental images that accompany it are entirely false. It is, indeed, doubtful whether anyone except an extreme visualist who is also a trained artist ever has mental images which are particularly like the things he is thinking about.
In these examples the mental image is not only unlike the reality but is known to be unlike it, at least after a moment’s reflection. I know that London is not merely Euston Station. Let us now go on to a slightly different predicament. I once heard a lady tell her young daughter that you would die if you ate too many tablets of aspirin. ‘But why?’ asked the child, ‘it isn’t poisonous’. ‘How do you know it isn’t poisonous?’ said the mother. ‘Because’, said the child, ‘when you crush an aspirin tablet you don’t find horrid red things inside it’. Clearly, when this child thought of poison she had a mental picture of Horrid Red Things, just as I have a picture of Euston when I think of London. The difference is that whereas I know my image to be very unlike the real London, the child thought that poison was really red. To that extent she was mistaken. But this does not mean that everything she thought or said about poison was necessarily nonsensical. She knew perfectly well that a poison was something which killed you or made you ill if you swallowed it; and she knew, to some extent, which of the substances in her mother’s house were poisonous. If a visitor to that house had been warned by the child, ‘Don’t drink that. Mother says it is poison’, he would have been ill advised to neglect the warning on the ground that