Trained Imagination Can Produce Occult Phenomena

William Quan Judge · Black versus White Magic Series · 18 pages

The faculty of imagination, Judge complains at the outset, has been reduced to a very low level by modern western theorisers on mental philosophy — treated as merely the making of pictures, and therefore as the least serious of the mind's operations. The essay sets out to restore it, and the argument is that imagination properly trained is a formative power rather than a decorative one.

That claim does real work in the theosophical account of phenomena. If images held with sufficient definiteness and force are causal rather than passive, then the production of an object or an appearance by occult means requires no new principle — only the discipline that most people never apply to a faculty they use constantly and carelessly. Published in The Path in December 1892, with material from James Rhoades and from Apollonius accompanying Judge's text, and a frontispiece by Demidy. It is best read beside his study of precipitation, which treats the same question from the other end.

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