The human imagination has always been controlled by certain basic images, in which man's own nature, his relation to his fellows, and his dependence upon the divine power find expression. The individual did not make them for himself. He absorbs them from the society in which he is born, partly through the suggestion of outward acts and the significance of words, partly, it would seem, by some more hidden means of appropriation. The contents of other people's minds flow into ours at a subconscious level, even across gaps in time and space, a fact constantly evidence, and as constantly disbelieved....
In ages for which religion and poetry were a common possession, the basic images lived in the conscious mind; men saw their place and destiny, their worth and guilt, and the process of their existence, in terms of them....
An image thrown in isolation on the screen means nothing, because it may mean anything: and everyone who has touched the interpretation of images has experienced this bewilderment. In a long concatenation of images, each fixes the sense of others, and is itself determiend by them. If we appreciate the connexion rightly, we feel the new image emerging out of the hidden mind under the evocation of the images already in place, as St John saw the figure of the Beast come up out of the deep when the Dragon's feet touched the sand of the sea.
Austin Farrer, A Rebirth of Images, pp. 13, 14, 18.
