Few suggestions for the exercise of the creative imagination can be given. Here rules are more of a hinderance than a help. The imagination is not creative in the sense of evolving something out of nothing,—this notion has misled many in their estimate of genius,—but in the sense of producing that which never existed, at least for the individual himself. Its activity has been denominated plastic from the fact that it moulds and fashions the materials or images into the forms which the new product is to assume. The influence of judgment is needed to keep the imagination from violating the laws and principles inherent in the things from which its materials are drawn. The understanding aids and is aided by this creative, plastic function of the imagination. The two should have free play in productive thinking. Let the student of science or art saturate himself with the theme on which he is working; let him keep health and energy of body and mind at their highest point; let him concentrate his best powers on what is to be accomplished, keeping clearly in mind the end to be reached and the materials to be used; the product for which he is working will spring into being in ways that he cannot explain. Like an unfathomable well which has been gathering its waters through hidden channels from mysterious sources, the stream of thought comes welling up from the depth of the soul into the conscious life of the thinker, giving him the living waters by which he can satisfy the thirst for knowledge felt by other souls. In expressing, formulating, and communicating the thoughts which thus come to him he cannot help feeling the “joy of creating.” “The history of literature,” says Shedd, “furnishes many examples of men whose knowledge only increased their sorrow, because it never found an efflux from their own minds into the world. Knowledge uncommunicated is something like remorse unconfessed. The mind, not being allowed to go out of itself, and to direct its energies towards an object and end greater and worthier than itself, turns back upon itself, and becomes morbidly self-reflecting and self-conscious. A studious and reflecting man of this class is characterized by excessive fastidiousness, which makes him dissatisfied with all that he does himself or sees done by others; which represses and finally suppresses all the buoyant and spirited activity of the intellect, leaving it sluggish as ‘the dull weed that rots by Lethe’s wharf.’”