1897] The "Sympsychograph" 



provoked during my absence. Before leaving for Trying to 

 the North I had written what seemed to me a bit be f unny 

 of gentle satire l 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- 

 psychograph ("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 cat 

 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 



