An Introduction to the History of ScienceLibby, Walter
History
An Introduction to the History of Science
Libby, Walter
Science -- History
The psychology of individuals and groups shows startling differences in
the kind and vividness of imagery. Many cases are on record where the
mental life is almost exclusively in visual, in auditory, or in motor
terms. One student learns a foreign language by writing out every word
and sentence; another is wholly dependent on hearing them spoken; a
third can recall the printed page with an almost photographic
vividness. The history of literature and art furnishes us with
illustrations of remarkable powers of visualization. Blake and Fromentin
were able to reproduce in pictures scenes long retained in memory. The
latter recognized that his painting was not an exact reproduction of
what he had seen, but that it was none the less artistic because of the
selective influence that his mind had exerted on the memory image.
Wordsworth at times postponed the description of a scene that appealed
to his poetic fancy with the express purpose of blurring the outlines,
but enhancing the personal factor. Goethe had the power to call up at
will the form of a flower, to make it change from one color to another
and to unfold before his mind's eye. Professor Dilthey has collected
many other records of the hallucinatory clearness of the visual imagery
of literary artists.
On the other hand, Galton, after his classical study of mental imagery
(1883), stated that scientific men, as a class, have feeble powers of
visual representation. He had appealed for evidence of visual recall to
distinguished scientists because he thought them more capable than
others of accurately stating the results of their introspection. He had
recourse not only to English but to foreign scientists, including
members of the French Institute. "To my astonishment," he writes, "I
found that the great majority of men of science to whom I first applied
protested that mental imagery was unknown to them, and they looked on me
as fanciful and fantastic in supposing that the words 'mental imagery'
really expressed what I believed everybody supposed them to mean. They
had no more notion of its true nature than a color-blind man, who has
not discerned his defect, has of the nature of color." One scientist
confessed that it was only by a figure of speech that he could describe
his recollection of a scene as a mental image to be perceived with the
mind's eye.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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