Inquiries into human faculty and its developmentGalton, Francis
Science
Inquiries into human faculty and its development
Galton, Francis
Ability; Eugenics
materials somewhat before saying more about them.
After several trials I found that the associated ideas admitted
of being divided into three main groups. First there is the imagined
sound of words, as in verbal quotations or names of persons. This
was frequently a mere parrot-like memory which acted instantaneously
and in a meaningless way, just as a machine might act. In the next
group there was every other kind of sense imagery; the chime of
imagined bells, the shiver of remembered cold, the scent of some
particular locality, and, much more frequently than all the rest
put together, visual imagery. The last of the three groups contains
what I will venture, for the want of a better name, to call
"histrionic" representations. It includes those cases where I either
act a part in imagination, or see in imagination a part acted, or,
most commonly by far, where I am both spectator and all the actors
at once, in an imaginary mental theatre. Thus I feel a nascent sense
of some muscular action while I simultaneously witness a puppet of
my brain--a part of myself--perform that action, and I assume a
mental attitude appropriate to the occasion. This, in my case, is a
very frequent way of generalising, indeed I rarely feel that I have
secure hold of a general idea until I have translated it somehow
into this form. Thus the word "abasement" presented itself to me, in
one of my experiments, by my mentally placing myself in a pantomimic
attitude of humiliation with half-closed eyes, bowed head, and
uplifted palms, while at the same time I was aware of myself as of a
mental puppet, in that position. This same word will serve to
illustrate the other groups also. It so happened in connection with
"abasement" that the word "David" or "King David" occurred to me on
one occasion in each of three out of the four trials; also that an
accidental misreading, or perhaps the merely punning association of
the words "a basement," brought up on all four occasions the image
of the foundations of a house that the builders had begun upon.
So much for the character of the association; next as to that of the
words. I found, after the experiments were over, that the words were
divisible into three distinct groups. The first contained "abbey,"
"aborigines," "abyss," and others that admitted of being presented
under some mental image. The second group contained "abasement,"
"abhorrence," "ablution," etc., which admitted excellently of
histrionic representation. The third group contained the more
abstract words, such as "afternoon," "ability," "abnormal," which
were variously and imperfectly dealt with by my mind. I give the
results in the upper part of Table III., and, in order to save
trouble, I have reduced them to percentages in the lower lines of
the Table.
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