cat 



1897] The "Sympsychograph* 



provoked during my absence. Before leaving for Trying to 

 the North I had written what seemed to me a bit 

 of gentle satire 1 directed at certain assertions con- 

 cerning the supremacy, without intervening agencies, 

 of mind over matter. My article was illustrated by 

 spurious experiments in mental photography, sug- 

 gested by several " fakes" then appearing in the 

 current press. In it, by way of ridiculing current 

 claims to the photographing of mental images by 

 turning the camera on the eye, I imagined a sym- 

 psycbograpb ("composite-soul-picture") with a lens 

 of many facets (like a fly's eye) from each of which 

 an electrical connection ran to the eye of every 

 individual in a group of people engaged in framing 

 an "intensive mental image" of a cat. The photo- The 

 graph assumed to have resulted from this process 

 was very striking a comfortable cat at rest, with 

 various shadowy feline faces in the background. As 

 a matter of fact, Professor Sanford had made for 

 me a composite of several negatives of the pet of 

 Roble Hall. 



The satirical nature of my story I had supposed 

 sufficiently clear, especially my proposition simi- 

 larly to photograph "the cat's idea of man." But 

 the scientific minuteness of detail proved to be 

 fatally complete, and a surprising number of people 

 took the thing seriously. One clergyman even went 

 so far as to announce a series of six discourses on 

 : 'the Lesson of the Sympsychograph," while many 

 others welcomed the alleged discovery as verifying 

 what they had long believed, and an eminent pro- 

 fessor soberly opined that my reputation as a psy- 



1 "The Sympsychograph: A Study in Impressionist Physics"; Popular 

 Science Monthly, September, 1897. 



C 599 3 



