Inquiries into human faculty and its developmentGalton, Francis
Science
Inquiries into human faculty and its development
Galton, Francis
Ability; Eugenics
It remains to summarise what has been said in the foregoing memoir.
I have desired to show how whole 1 strata of mental operations that
have lapsed out of ordinary consciousness, admit of being dragged
into light, recorded and treated statistically, and how the
obscurity that attends the initial steps of our thoughts can thus be
pierced and dissipated. I then showed measurably the rate at which
associations sprung up, their character, the date of their first
formation, their tendency to recurrence, and their relative
precedence. Also I gave an instance showing how the phenomenon of a
long-forgotten scene, suddenly starting into consciousness, admitted
in many cases of being explained. Perhaps the strongest of the
impressions left by these experiments regards the multifariousness
of the work done by the mind in a state of half-unconsciousness, and
the valid reason they afford for believing in the existence of still
deeper strata of mental operations, sunk wholly below the level of
consciousness, which may account for such mental phenomena as cannot
otherwise be explained. We gain an insight by these experiments into
the marvellous number and nimbleness of our mental associations, and
we also learn that they are very far indeed from being infinite in
their variety. We find that our working stock of ideas is narrowly
limited and that the mind continually recurs to the same instruments
in conducting its operations, therefore its tracks necessarily
become more defined and its flexibility diminished as age advances.
ANTECHAMBER OF CONSCIOUSNESS.
When I am engaged in trying to think anything out, the process of
doing so appears to me to be this: The ideas that lie at any moment
within my full consciousness seem to attract of their own accord the
most appropriate out of a number of other ideas that are lying close
at hand, but imperfectly within the range of my consciousness. There
seems to be a presence-chamber in my mind where full consciousness
holds court, and where two or three ideas are at the same time in
audience, and an antechamber full of more or less allied ideas,
which is situated just beyond the full ken of consciousness. Out of
this antechamber the ideas most nearly allied to those in the
presence-chamber appear to be summoned in a mechanically logical way,
and to have their turn of audience.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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