18 Mr. Francis Galton [Jan. 27 



dealer. An analogous trick upon the sight could not be performed 

 by a conjuror. Thus he could never make his audience believe that 

 the floor of the room was the ceiling. 



As regards the other senses, the theatre of the imagination coin- 

 cides fairly well with that of the sensations. It is so with taste and 

 smell, also with touch, in so far that an imagined impression or pain 

 is always located in some particular part of the body, then if it be 

 localised in the same place as a real pain it must coalesce with it. 



Finally, it is of high importance to success in experiments on 

 Imagination that the object and its associated imagery should be so 

 habitually connected that a critical attitude of the mind shall not 

 easily separate them. Suppose an apparatus arranged to associate 

 the waxing and waning of a light with the rising and falling of a 

 sound, holding means in reserve for privately modifying the illumi- 

 nation at the will of the experimenter, in order that the waxing and 

 waning may be lessened, abolished, or even reversed. It is quite 

 possible that a person who had no idea of the purport of the experi- 

 ment might be deceived, and be led by his imagination to declare 

 that the light still waxed and waned in unison with the sound after 

 its ups and downs had been reduced to zero. But if the subject of 

 the experiment suspected its object, he would be thrown into a critical 

 mood ; his mind would stiffen itself, as it were, and he would be 

 difficult to deceive. 



Having made these preliminary remarks, I will mention one only 

 of some experiments I have made and am making from time to time, 

 to measure the force of my own imagination. It happens that 

 although most persons train themselves from childhood upwards to 

 distinguish imagination from fact, there is at least one instance in 

 which we do the exact reverse, namely, in respect to the auditory 

 presentation of the words that are perused by the eye. It would be 

 otherwise impossible to realise the sonorous flow of the passages, 

 whether in prose or poetry, that are read only with the eyes. We all 

 of us value and cultivate this form of auditory imagination, and it 

 commonly grows into a well-developed faculty. I infer that when we 

 are listening to the words of a reader while our eyes are simultane- 

 ously perusing a copy of the book from which he is reading, that 

 the effects of the auditory imagination concur with the actual sound, 

 and produce a stronger impression than the latter alone would be 

 able to make. 



I have very frequently experimented on myself with success, with 

 the view of analysing this concurrent impression into its constituents, 

 being aided thereto by two helpful conditions, the one is a degree of 

 deafness which prevents me when sitting on a seat in the middle 

 rows from following memoirs that are read in tones suitable to the 

 audience at large ; and the other is the accident of belonging to 

 societies in which unrevised copies of the memoirs that are about to 

 be read, usually in a monotonous voice, are obtainable, in order to be 

 perused simultaneously by the eye. Now it sometimes happens that 



