Page 76 - Napoleon Hill Think and Grow Rich Full Book | Success Learned

The Fifth Step toward Riches

The imagination is literally the workshop wherein are fashioned all plans created
by man. The impulse, the DESIRE, is given shape, form, and ACTION through
the aid of the imaginative faculty of the mind.

It has been said that man can create anything which he can imagine.

Of all the ages of civilization, this is the most favorable for the development of the
imagination, because it is an age of rapid change. On every hand one may contact
stimuli which develop the imagination.

Through the aid of his imaginative faculty, man has discovered, and harnessed,
more of Nature's forces during the past fifty years than during the entire history
of the human race, previous to that time. He has conquered the air so completely,
that the birds are a poor match for him in flying. He has harnessed the ether, and
made it serve as a means of instantaneous communication with any part of the
world. He has analyzed, and weighed the sun at a distance of millions of miles,
and has determined, through the aid of IMAGINATION, the elements of which it
consists. He has discovered that his own brain is both a broadcasting, and a re-
ceiving station for the vibration of thought, and he is beginning now to learn how
to make practical use of this discovery. He has increased the speed of locomotion,
until he may now travel at a speed of more than three hundred miles an hour.

The time will soon come when a man may breakfast in New York, and lunch in
San Francisco.

MAN'S ONLY LIMITATION, within reason, LIES IN HIS DEVELOPMENT AND
USE OF HIS IMAGINATION. He has not yet reached the apex of development in
the use of his imaginative faculty. He has merely discovered that he has an imagi-
nation, and has commenced to use it in a very elementary way.

TWO FORMS OF IMAGINATION

The imaginative faculty functions in two forms. One is known as "synthetic imag-
ination," and the other as "creative imagination." SYNTHETIC IMAGINATION: -

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NAPOLEON HILL THINK AND GROW RICH

Through this faculty, one may arrange old concepts, ideas, or plans into new
combinations. This faculty creates nothing. It merely works with the material
of experience, education, and observation with which it is fed. It is the faculty