82 



SCIENCE. 



[Vol. II., No. 24. 



investigations into visxialized number-forms. 

 Here the nature of the facts is the best guar- 

 anty of their general accuracj'. The.y have 

 generalh' been unknown, save to the subjects ; 

 thej' are not things of -whicli people are apt 

 to boast ; their psychological significance is far 

 greater than their popular interest ; they have 

 nothing of the elevated or of the spiritual about 

 them ; the research is quite new. All this 

 secures the substantial correctness of the re- 

 sults, though, plainl}', further accurate research 

 will become harder when Mr. Galton's facts 

 become more popularh" known. 

 f: One general result that Mr. Galton seems to 

 have established is, that growth in the power 

 of abstract thought is opposed to the free de- 

 velopment of the visualizing faculty. Scien- 

 tific men have, as a rule, less vivid imagery 

 than persons of less abstract habits of mind. 

 Adults visualize less clearlj- than children. 

 But this loss of visualizing power does not 

 signifj', he tells us, loss of clear memorj' of 

 details. " Men who declare themselves en- 

 tirely deficient in the power of seeing mental 

 pictures can, nevertheless, give lifelike de- 

 scriptions of what thej' have seen." Again: 

 " it is a mistake to suppose that sharp sight is 

 accompanied by clear visual memory." Yet 

 more: "the visualizing and the identifying 

 powers are bj' no means necessarily com- 

 bined." Thus our author tells us that one 

 distinguished subject is good at recognizing 

 faces, but cannot visualize them at all. All 

 these facts, and many others, seem to us to 

 point to a result that Mr. Galton sometimes 

 approaches, but does not distinctly- formulate. 

 On the contrarj', in one place he saj's some- 

 thing directly opposed to it. ' ' A visual im- 

 age," he says (p. 113), "is the most perfect 

 form of merftal representation, wherever the 

 shape, position, and relations of objects in 

 space are concerned." And he thinks that 

 mere laziness is responsible for the common 

 starvation of this facult}- ; but, if this were so, 

 it is hard to see how a health}' mental organ- 

 ism should, in the course of its normal develop- 

 ment, generally tend to outgrow the visualizing 

 facult}'. ' The most perfect form of mental 

 representation ' for any purpose will not be the 

 one that we should, as evolutionists, expect to 

 find growing naturally less as the mind de- 

 votes itself more to that purpose ; yet who 

 are more concerned with the exact relations of 

 things in space than workers in the details of 

 descriptive natural science? And thej', we are 

 told, are apt to lack the facultj' in question. 

 The statement just quoted seems, then, to lack 

 probabilit\-, and to be against the main result 



to wliich, as we have said, all these researches 

 seem to lead. 



This result, we think, is that the clearest 

 memorj-, in the long-run, tends to be the 

 memorj' of acts, and not of the content of a 

 sensation apart from its immediate relation 

 to an action. This seems reasonable from 

 the point of view of evolution. The life of 

 an animal consists in doing what seems best 

 under the circumstances ; and the seeming is 

 determined bj- instinct or individual experi- 

 ence, coupled with immediate sensation. All, 

 then, that sensations mean for the animal, is 

 summed up in saying that the sensation is 

 useful as the sign of the need of a certain kind 

 of action. The association of a given kind of 

 . sensation with a given kind of action results 

 from individual or ancestral experience ; but, 

 in forming this association, not the whole of an 

 experience need be remembered, but onlj- so 

 much as shall serve as a sign of a given sort 

 of action. The mouse, even if it fled from the 

 cat, not bj- instinct, but voluntarily, would still 

 not need to visualize cats, but onl}- to remem- 

 ber so much of the sensations aroused by a cat's 

 presence as should suffice to arouse the right 

 action. 



On the other hand, if a given action is to 

 be not automatic, but voluntary, the action 

 must be conceivable clearly and in detail. If 

 this is so, it will follow that the memory 'for 

 ideas connected with muscular sensations, and 

 so for actions, both bodily and intellectual, 

 would not merely be capable of substitution 

 for visualized images, but would normally tend 

 to be so substituted. In fact, if a visualized 

 image were the ' most perfect form of mental 

 representation ' for space relations, then geo- 

 metrical reflection and deflnition would be a 

 useless amusement in all cases of small ob- 

 jects. The other facts noted above, such as 

 the relative power to identify without being able 

 to visualize, seem to us capable of explana- 

 tion in a similar fashion, by the relative prepon- 

 derance of the memory for actions, and conse- 

 quently of relations (which we know by virtue 

 of our own bodil}- and mental actions) , over the 

 memorj' of the contents of bare sensation. 



But we have said nothing of Mr. Galton's 

 composite photographs, of his researches on 

 association, or of the many other topics that 

 render his book not onlj- very amusing, bat 

 especiallj' instructive, as showing how what in 

 the hands of another man would be mere dilet- 

 tanteisra becomes in the hands of the master a 

 A'ery valuable series of contributions to science. 

 And with these suggestions we must leave a 

 very pleasant topic. 



