Inquiries into human faculty and its developmentGalton, Francis
Science
Inquiries into human faculty and its development
Galton, Francis
Ability; Eugenics
sure how far I saw the picture as such, in my mental view, or how
far I had thrown my own personality into the picture, and was acting
it as actors might act a mystery play, by the puppets of my own brain,
that were parts of myself. As a matter of fact, I entered it under
the heading of sense imagery, but it might very properly have gone
to swell the number of the histrionic entries.
The "afternoon" series suggested a great preponderance of mere catch
words, showing how slowly I was able to realise the meaning of
abstractions; the phrases intruded themselves before the thoughts
became defined. It occasionally occurred that I puzzled wholly over
a word, and made no entry at all; in thirteen cases either this
happened, or else after one idea had occurred the second was too
confused and obscure to admit of record, and mention of it had to be
omitted in the foregoing Table. These entries have forcibly shown to
me the great imperfection in my generalising powers; and I am sure
that most persons would find the same if they made similar trials.
Nothing is a surer sign of high intellectual capacity than the power
of quickly seizing and easily manipulating ideas of a very abstract
nature. Commonly we grasp them very imperfectly, and cling to their
skirts with great difficulty.
In comparing the order in which the ideas presented themselves, I
find that a decided precedence is assumed by the histrionic ideas,
wherever they occur; that verbal associations occur first and with
great quickness on many occasions, but on the whole that they are
only a little more likely to occur first than second; and that
imagery is decidedly more likely to be the second than the first of
the associations called up by a word. In short, gesture-language
appeals the most quickly to my feelings,
It would be very instructive to print the actual records at length,
made by many experimenters, if the records could be clubbed together
and thrown into a statistical form; but it would be too absurd to
print one's own singly. They lay bare the foundations of a man's
thoughts with curious distinctness, and exhibit his mental anatomy
with more vividness and truth than he would probably care to publish
to the world.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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