2 7 o TEE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



THE PICTUEE AND THE TEXT 



By Pkofessoe ROBERT MACDOTJGALL 



NEW YORK UNIVERSITY 



THE place of illustration in book-making is found to vary through 

 a wide range of values as one reviews a series of volumes at hap- 

 hazard. In some the pages are flooded with pictures, from thumb-nail 

 sketches on the margins to full-page prints in the natural colors of the 

 original ; in others page succeeds page in unbroken letter-press, without 

 an illustration from cover to cover. Here, too, the picture is a true illus- 

 tration of the text it accompanies; there it has scarcely more relation to 

 the contents of the page it fronts than the engraving on a drawing-room 

 wall bears to the volumes that may lie on a table before it. The sig- 

 nificance of the picture, as an illustration, varies as much as, let us say, 

 the artistic merit of its execution; and its value in any individual case 

 may lie anywhere between zero and ideal adequacy. 



The reasons for such fluctuation in the employment of illustration 

 are of course legitimate as well as illegitimate. In one case, illustration 

 may be indispensable, in another, inadmissable ; the book-maker, whether 

 author or publisher, is guided by the nature of his subject. In general, 

 the material dealt with must be picturable if illustration is to be practi- 

 cable. Only a small part of what the mind deals with in representative 

 thought is thus picturable, and reflection itself is but one of the many 

 interests which life comprises. To be presented in this spatial and visi- 

 ble manner the subject must be both concrete and material. Not all 

 such subject-matter, indeed, can be successfully represented; but to con- 

 form to the conditions of picture-making it must at least fulfill these re- 

 quirements. 



Much of our interest, both speculative and practical, falls outside 

 this field of sensible reality. The relations and laws of things in the 

 material world, for example, are abstractions which we formulate from 

 the observation of a series of such individual concrete objects; and these 

 abstractions, or generalizations, can not be represented pictorially, except 

 figuratively, in a symbolic scheme. Such principles are aspects of the 

 material world, though unpicturable ; but there is another range of 

 reality which does not offer itself to such treatment at all. Subjective 

 experience has no sensible or representable content upon which to seize 

 as the basis of an appeal to the eye. The absurdity of such a conception 

 may be indicated by asking the shape of a thought, the color of anger, 

 or the speed of a desire. When things belonging to this realm are writ- 



