Message #190638

[Apparition from Beyond the Veil]

On this point Mr. Francis Galton, in his Inquiries into Human Faculty (1833), is very instructive.  Mr. Galton drew up a short catechism, asking people how clearly or how dimly they saw things “in their mind’s eye”.

“Think of your breakfast-table,” he said; “is your mental picture of it as clearly illuminated and as complete as your actual view of the scene?”  Mr. Galton began by questioning friends in the scientific world, F.R.S.’s and other savants.  “The earliest results of my inquiry amazed me. . . .  The great majority of the 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.”  One gentleman wrote: “It is only by a figure of speech that I can describe my recollection of a scene as a ‘mental image’ which I can ‘see’ with ‘my mind’s eye’.  I do not see it,” so he seems to have supposed that nobody else did.