A first book in psychology

Front matter

.0^^

Oo^

0^

Chapter II Perception And Imagination

I. Perception and Imagination as Experiences of the Related Self

What am I at this present moment ? I am a self, conscious of holding a blue celluloid pen, of looking down upon a white page, of hearing '' The Road to Mandalay " whistled by a man who is mowing beneath my window, conscious also of the fragrance of the freshly cut grass and the warmth of the day, and, all the while, imagining a Tyrolese mountain landscape which I have never seen. I am, in other words, a perceiving and imagining self, and though this is certainly no exhaustive account of me, still I may well attempt no more, at this stage of my psychologizing, than the close description and the explanation of perception and imagination, the experiences so far enumerated in the self of the present.*

It will be convenient to begin with the analysis of perception. I notice first that in perceiving pen, paper, and tune I am directly aware of a certain inevitableness and involuntariness in the experience. I must see and touch just this pen ; I can-

* Before reading further, and without consulting any book, the student should state, in writing, all the likenesses and the differences which he can observe between (i) his experience as he perceives the desk (or rug, or hat) at which he is looking, and (2) his experience as he imagines a similar desk (rug, or hat) in some other room. The record of this introspection may profitably be compared with that of other students.

not help feeling warm; I must hear this tune and must smell the odor of the falling grass. I may wish that I held a silver pen, that I were cool, not warm, that I were smelling roses instead of hay ; but I am bound down, in my perceiving, to precisely this experience. I am, in a word, directly conscious of myself as receptive. And this direct consciousness of receptivity, prominent in my perception, is wanting to my imagination. In some sense, at least, my imaginings are under my own control. In the present case, for example, I can turn from the inner contemplation of the mountain view to the imagining — let us say — of the prosaic interior of a German psychological laboratory.

A second significant difference between perceiving and imagining is revealed not of necessity during the perception, but as I reflect on it or look back on it. To such reflective observation it is evident that my perception has been shared, or at any rate that it might have been shared, by other selves ; whereas I need not, unless I will, share my imaginings. For example, the housemaid dusting the room can see my blue pen and white paper, can hear the whistled melody, and smell the hay and feel the warmth. But the housemaid does not share my imagination of the Tyrolese mountains any more than I read the imagination which has brought a smile to her lips. People share our imaginings in a sense, when they try to reproduce them, yet, evidently, the world of imagination has a privacy foreign to the common world of our perceptions.

From this privacy of imagination follows a third difference. It is this : perception is reflectively regarded as my consciousness of relation to an external or ' independent' object, whereas the object of imagination, though impersonal, is not externalized. The object of perception is thus, from the point of

Perception and Imagination 13

view of the psychologist, the external pen or mowing-machine, whereas the object of imagination is no external object, but rather the mere image of landscape or of harmony.

Three differences have thus been emphasized as distinguishing perception from imagination: (i) my immediately realized receptivity, or passivity, in perceiving; (2) the reflectively realized community of my perception with the experience of other selves ; (3) my relation in perception to an object which I regard as independent and external. But these distinctions must not obscure the likenesses. Perception resembles imagination in at least three ways, (i) Both are known (to reflection, if not immediately) as impersonal consciousness, in the sense that in perceiving and imagining I am not predominantly conscious of selves. I perceive or imagine pen, paper, tune, but I do not perceive or imagine you or myself. In the second place, (2) both perception and imagination are forms of particularizing consciousness. I do not, for example, perceive or imagine pens in general, or even the class of celluloid pens, but rather this particular, individual pen. A final, highly important likeness of perception and imagination is the following : (3) Both are chiefly sensational experiences concerned with vision, touch, and hearing rather than with feeling or with the consciousness of relation. This consideration will lead us to a psychological analysis different from that already attempted. It is expedient, therefore, to summarize our results. Perception has been described as sensational, passive, impersonal, externalizing, and particularizing consciousness reflectively realized as common to other selves. Imagination has been described as sensational, impersonal, and particularizing, but as lacking the consciousness of passivity, of externality.

and of community. To the detailed study of perception and imagination as sensational we must now turn.

II. Perception and Imagination as Sensational

The conscious self is, as we have seen, persistent, unique, related, and complex. If now we arbitrarily drop out of account the persistence, the uniqueness, and even the related-

ness, we are still conscious of complexity. The mental

• reduction of this complex experience to its lowest terms gives

what are called the structural elements of consciousness. These apparently irreducible constituents seem to fall into three main classes which have been called 'sensational' (or 'substantive')*; (2) 'attributive' (sometimes called by the name of the chief subclass ' affective ' elements) ; and (3) 'relational.' To illustrate from the experience which we are studying: My consciousness of hlueness is a sensational element ; my consciousness of the unpleasantness of the warm day is an affective element ; and, finally, my consciousness of the contrast between the blue of the pen handle and the blue of my account-book coyer is a relational experience. It is evident that my experiences may be distinguished according as one or other of these elemental kinds of consciousness predominates ; and it is equally evident that, from this point of view, perception and imagination are both chiefly sensational in character, distinguished mainly as the consciousness of colors, sounds, and fragrances.

Between perception and imagination as sensational complexes three further distinctions may ordinarily be made. If I close my eyes, and then imagine the oval gilt frame

* On all this, cf. Appendix, Section III., § 29 ff.

Perception and Imagination 15

which stands on my desk, and if I then reopen my eyes and compare perception with imagination, I shall find that the imagination differs from the perception, first, in that it is sensationally less intense — the gilt of the imaged frame is duller ; second, in that it is less complex — I lack altogether the consciousness of certain details of the frame ; and finally, in that it is more evanescent, more readily displaced by other imaginings. And yet there are cases of imagination which lack one or more of these characteristics. The perception of one's bodily attitude, for example,, may be less intense, less accurate, and less permanent than the visual imagination of a face or the auditory imagination of a melody ; one's perception of an unknown substance, which one merely tastes or smells, may be less vivid, also, than one's visual imagination of a bowl of strawberries or of a roasted duck. All this proves that intensity, detail, and stability are merely common and not necessary characteristics of perception. Indeed, the only invariable distinctions are those enumerated in the preceding section of this chapter.

In perception and in imagination alike, my sensational experiences are of different sorts : I see, hear, smell, and touch. And one way of classifying both perception and imagination is according to predominant sense-elements. Such a classification is, however, of most significance as applied to imagination, for, as has appeared, my imagination is in some degree controllable ; and I may therefore make practical use of the discovery that my imagination is chiefly visual or auditory. In what follows we shall study imagination as sensational, but we must remind ourselves that all the distinctions which are made are equally, though less fruitfully, applicable to perception.

Concrete imagination — that is to say, the imagination of things, scenes, and events — must, in the first place, be distinguished from merely verbal imagination. Concrete imagination may belong to any sense-order, but it is in the main either visual, auditory, or tactual; or else it belongs to a 'mixed' type, including elements of several kinds. Every student of psychology should undertake an introspective study of the sense-type of his imagination by the use of some such questionary as the following : * —

a. In imagining a pink rose,

1. {a) Do you see its color and the green of its leaves?

{h) Are the pink and green as vivid as those of a real rose?

2. {a) Can you see its shape?

{h) Is it as distinctly outlined as the objects now before you on the table?

3. Can you smell it?

4. Can you feel the smoothness of its petals and leaves?

5. Can you feel the coolness of its petals and leaves?

6. Can you feel the prick of its thorns?

h. In thinking of the words of "My Country, 'tis of thee,"

1. Can you see them printed?

2. Can you hear yourself say them?

3. Can you hear yourself sing them?

4. Can you feel yourself form the words in your throat and with

your lips and tongue?

5. Can you hear the organ play ''America"?

c. Arrange the following experiences in order of the distinctness {i.e. clearness or vividness) with which you can remember (or imagine) them : —

1. A triangle drawn with black lead on white paper.

2. A plane surface of lemon-yellow.

3. The hum of a mosquito.

4. The crack of a whip.

* Condensed from a questionary formulated by Professor Gamble and used in the Wellesley College Laboratory since 1898-1899. These questions should be answered, in writing, before the student reads further.

Sense-types of Imagination 17

5. The 'feel' of soap.

6. The 'feel' of dough.

7. The heat of a hot plate.

8. The smell of peppermint.

9. The smell of onion. 10. The taste of salt.

It is obvious that one who 'sees' the pink and green and shape of the rose has a visual imagination, and that visual imaginations differ according as colors or forms are more distinctly visualized. The person with auditory imagination can ' hear ' the sound of the organ and the crack of the whip ; and, in similar fashion, the other types of concrete imagination are tested by these questions. It should be noted that, in many experiences, visual imagination supplements the perception of pressure and of sound, as when we 'localize' a touch by imagining the look of wrist or of forehead, on which it falls, or imagine the puffing red motor-car at sound of its bell.

There is no character in which individuals differ more widely than in the prevailing sense-type of their imagination. In recalling, for example, the balcony scene in " Romeo and Juliet," some people see with the eye of the mind the shadowy form of Romeo and the figure of Juliet, clear-cut against the lighted window, the ' stony limits,' the cypresses, statues, and fountains of the Italian garden, and the "blessed moon . . . that tips with silver all these fruit-tree tops " ; others, like Juliet, may ''know the sound of that tongue's utterance," and may hear, in imagination, Romeo's deep-voiced lovemaking and the "silver-sweet sound" of Juliet's replies "like softest music to attending ears." Still others, finally, may image Romeo's movements as "with love's light wings" he "did o'erperch these walls."

The study of an imaginative writer often reveals the predominant sense-order of his imagination. His pages may glow with color or thrill with music or quiver with rhythmic motion. The blind poet, Philip Bourke Marston, for example, describes a garden ravaged by "winds in the night, without pity or pardon," in verses which contain no colorword, though they make mention of the garden's ' scent and sound,' and are full of striking images of pressure and of cold : —

''All my song birds are dead in their bushes — Woe for such things !

"Oh, my dead birds! each in his nest there, So cold and stark; What was the horrible death that pressed there When skies were dark?

"What shall I do foY my roses' sweetness The Summer round — For all my Garden's divine completeness Of scent and sound?

This colorless garden stands in sharp contrast to Shelley's forest, swept by the

"... wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn's being, Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing. Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red."

Sometimes, indeed, a poet's lines seem to disclose to us his peculiar delight in special colors or sounds. So Shelley, once more, seems most readily to imagine the greens and

Sense-types of Imagination 19

blues and purples of nature. He looks off upon wide landscapes, and

" Beneath is spread like a green sea The waveless plain of Lombardy."

He looks downward, from his boat, and sees

"... the deep's untrampled floor With green and purple sea-weeds strown. "

He looks outward to far horizons and

"Blue isles and snowy mountains wear The purple noon's transparent might."

He does not see the '' legion'd rooks " who '' hail " the rising sun as black, but compares

to clouds '' fleck'd with fire and azure." Even his gardens are full of "tender blue bells," of ''flowers azure, black, and streak'd with gold," and of ''broad fiag-fiowers, purple prank'd with white."

The most common type of concrete imagination probably is the visual, for, in spite of individual differences, most people can imagine objects in some vague outline and in some dull color. Every sculptor, painter, or architect who sees his vision before he embodies it has visual imagination. The inventor also 'sees' his engine or his dynamo in all its parts and connections, before he enters upon the actual construction of it ; and the well-dressed woman sees the end from the beginning, the completed gown within the shapeless fabric. Above all, visual imagination is the ?indowment of the geometer and of the scientist. The one imagines the projections and intersections of lines and planes; the other beholds the planets moving in their courses, peoples the earth with the forms of animals long extinct, or makes of every common object a palpitating dance of atoms and subatoms. Even a poet's imagination may hesitate before the challenging hypotheses of science, for it is said that Wordsworth once exclaimed, "I have not enough imagination to become a geologist."

Yet in spite of the value of visual images to artists, inventors, and mathematicians, it must at once be acknowledged that, even to them, the visual type of imagination is not indispensable, but that it may be replaced by what we know as the tactual-motor type, the imaging of the movements by which one traces the outlines of figures or of designs. Galton found, as result of careful inquiry, that "men who declare themselves entirely deficient in the power of seeing mental pictures — can become painters of the rank of Royal Academicians." And James says of himself, ''I am a good draughtsman and have a very lively interest in pictures, statues, architecture, and decoration, and a keen sensibility to artistic effects. But I am an extremely poor visualizer, and find myself often unable to reproduce in my mind's eye pictures which I have most carefully examined." * In these cases, a quickness to recognize and to discriminate colors and forms is combined with the inability to imagine them. Evidently, visual imagination is here replaced by pressure imagination — imagination of the motions necessary to the production of sculpture, machine, or figure : a sculptor of this type reproduces in imagination the movements of his chisel, and the geometrician draws his figure or indicates by imaged movements the sweep of orbits and the intersection of lines.

Kiilpe discovered, experimentally, the same lack of visual

* The "Principles of Psychology," Vol. II., p. 53.

Sense-types of Imagination 21

imagination.* He tested the color-imagery of several students by pronouncing in a darkened room the names of colors and requiring them to describe the resulting experiences. One of these young men proved utterly incapable, with the strongest effort, of imagining any color whatever. Another historic example is Charcot's patient, a man whose visual imagery was impaired through nervous disease. "Asked to draw an arcade, he says, ' I remember that it contains semicircular arches, that two of them meeting at an angle make a vault, but how it looks I am absolutely unable to imagine.' . . . He complains of his loss of feeling for colors. 'My wife has black hair, this I know; but I can no more recall its color than I can her person and features !' " f

The auditory type of imagination is unquestionably less common than the visual, and it is almost always closely combined with imagery of the motor-tactual sort. It is the imagetype of the great musicians, of Beethoven, for example, who composed his symphonies when totally unable to hear a note of them. But though less significant to most of us than the visual images, the concrete auditory imagination belongs, at least in some degree, to all people who are able to recall voices and melodies. The prevalence of auditory imagery is suggested by the ordinary ruse of violin players, who produce the effect of a diminuendo, lengthened beyond the actual sound, by continuing the drawing motion of the bow when it no longer touches the string.

The most significant type of tactual (or pressure) imagination is frequently called the tactual-motor type — the imagination of the pressures, often internal, which are originally

* "Outlines of Psychology," Section 27, 9. t Cf. James, op. cit., Vol. II., p. 59.

due to bodily movements; the imagination, for example, of one's shortened breath as one is running. Imagination may be, also, of some other dermal sense-type, that is, of pain, of warmth, or of cold. Such experiences are perhaps rare, but they unquestionably occur. Keats, for example, vividly images the coldness of

" a draught of vintage, that hath been Cooled a long age in the deep-delved earth."

One must carefully distinguish between such imagining and the corresponding peripherally aroused sensation. The vivid account of a wound or a physical injury may excite, through the connection of cortical neurones through motor neurones with organic reactions, the actual, visceral pressure-sensations which constitute the feeling of faintness, and it may even excite the pain end-organs. In the same way, I grow actually hot over a remembered mortification and I shiver with cold at a revived fear.

Smell and taste imagination are relatively infrequent and their occurrence is, indeed, often denied. It is said that when we imagine objects fragrant in themselves, such as roses or cheese or coffee, we imagine their look or their feel without imagining their odor; and that when we suppose ourselves to imagine tastes, we are really imagining the colors and the forms of food. It will be admitted that from our dream dinners we are apt to wake before tasting anything, and that poetic descriptions of banquets dwell chiefly on the color of 'dusky loaf of 'golden yolks' and 'lucent syrops,' and on the texture of 'fruit . . . rough or smooth rined' or of 'jellies soother than the creamy curd ' ! Yet no one will deny that the poet must have imagined odors, and not colors , when he writes in the fifth stanza of the '' Ode to a Nightingale" : —

Sense-types of Imagination 23

'I cannot see what flowers are at my feet,

Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs,

But, in embalmed darkness, guess each sweet Wherewith the seasonable month endows

The grass, the thicket, and the fruit tree wild;

And mid-May's eldest child, The coming musk-rose, full of dewy wine."

Besides this unintended evidence from imaginative writers we have well-attested instances of the smell and taste imagination, both in waking experience and in dreams, of well-trained observers. An inquiry among fifty Wellesley College students, somewhat trained in introspection, disclosed the fact that thirty-one were sure that they could imagine the odors of certain substances, such as burning tar, burning sulphur, and mignonette.

More common than any of these classes of concrete imagination is that to which we have already referred as the 'mixed type.' The imagination of any object is likely, in other words, to include elements of more than one sense-order : it is not wholly visual and still less is it entirely auditory or tactual. Either the visual or auditory elements may predominate, but the imagination — of a dinner-party, for example — is rarely a mere complex of the colors and forms of dresses, faces, candles, flowers, foods, nor yet of the sounds of conversation, laughter, and service, but it includes both visual and auditory images, perhaps with a pressure image also of the 'feel' of linen or of silver, and a gustatory or olfactory image of the taste of beef or the odor of roses.

Contrasted with all these classes of concrete imagination are the verbal types, which are far more prevalent than any one, save the psychologist, realizes. In the experience of many people these altogether crowd out concrete imaginings. We suppose ourselves to be imagining the Heraion at Argos, the "Madonna della Sedia," or Liszt's "Hungarian Rhapsody," when, as a matter of fact, we are mainly saying to ourselves the words 'Heraion,' 'madonna,' 'rhapsody.' Of course this is an artificial state of affairs. Words are conventional symbols, not instinctive reactions; they play no part at all in the imaginative life of animal or of baby, and little part in that of the savage. The civilized being, however, is born into a world of people whose most characteristic activity is neither eating, walking, nor fighting, but talking. At first, through pure imitation, and afterwards because he recognizes the utility of language, he largely occupies himself with words, first heard and spoken, and later read and written. And as habits fall away through disuse, so, little by little, in the experience of most of us, word-images take the place of concreter images of color, sound, and the like. It is unnecessary to dwell on the immense utility of verbal imagination, for we are already victims of what Mr. Garrison calls ' the ignorant prejudice in favor of reading and writing,' and, he might have added, 'of talking.' Words serve not only as the means of communication, and thus as the surest method of social development, but — by their abstract, conventional form — as an aid to rapid memorizing and to clear reasoning; they are indispensable parts of our intellectual equipment; yet they are in themselves but poor and insignificant experiences, and they work us irreparable harm if they banish, from the life of our imagination, the warm colors, broad spaces, liquid sounds, and subtle fragrances which might enrich and widen our experience.

Verbal Imagination 25

We have ample proof that this is no purely fictitious danger. Galton's most significant conclusion from his statistical study of imagination is that the "faculty of seeing pictures, . . . if ever possessed by men of highly generalized and abstract thought, is very apt to be lost by disuse." Many of the ' men of science,' whose imagination he tested, had "no more notion" of the nature of visual imagery "than a color-blind man . . . has of the nature of color. ' It is only by a figure of speech,'" one of them says, "'that I can describe my recollection of a scene as a mental image that I can see with my mind's eye, ... I do not see it . . . any more than a man sees the thousand hnes of Sophokles which under due pressure he is ready to repeat.' " Every mixed figure is in truth a witness to the common lack of concrete imagery. The earnest preacher who exhorted his hearers to water the sparks of grace, and the fervid orator who bewailed the cup of Ireland's misery as 'long running over, but not yet full,' were, of course, without the visual images which their words should suggest. Doubtless, most of their hearers received these astounding statements without a quiver of amusement — not, primarily, because they lacked a sense of humor, but because they failed to translate the words into visual imagery.

The study of the varying forms of verbal imagination discloses the fact that, like the forms of concrete imagination, they belong usually to a visual, an auditory, a tactual, or a ' mixed ' class, though they may conceivably be of other sense-types. The good visualizer images his words as they are printed on a page, reading them off, sentence by sentence or verse by verse, recalling the precise part of the page on which a given word or sentence appears. Galton tells of a statesman who sometimes hesitates in the midst of a speech, because plagued by the image of his manuscript speech with its original erasures and corrections. Even musicians may be helped by symbolic imagery and may play by mentally reading their scores. Again, verbal imagination may be of words as heard ; and such masters of musical verse as Sophokles, Tennyson, and Swinburne must have auditory verbal imagery. One may 'hear' words spoken by oneself or by others, one may listen in imagination to conversations between different people, or one may recall whole scenes of a play in the characteristic intonations of different actors. "'When I write a scene,' said Legouve to Scribe,* ' I hear but you see. In each phrase which I write, the voice of the personage who speaks strikes my ear. Vous qui etes le theatre meme your actors walk, gesticulate before your eyes; I am a listener, you a spectator.'' 'Nothing more true,' said Scribe; 'do you know where I am when I write a piece? In the middle of the parterre.'"

One's verbal imagery, finally, may be of the tactual-motor type; one may imagine oneself as speaking, or, less often, as writing the words. A simple proof of the frequent occurrence of these motor images was suggested by Dr. Strieker : t the attempt to imagine a word containing several labials — such a word as 'bob' or 'pepper' — without the faintest imaged or actual movement of the lips. Most people will be unsuccessful in such an experiment, which brings to light the presence, in verbal imagining, of the imagination or perception of movements of the throat and lips. Even the distinct effort to visualize words may result in tactual-motor images. James, for example, "can seldom call to

* Quoted by W. James, op. cit., Vol. II., p. 60, from Binet.

t "Studien liber die Sprachvorstellungen." Cf. James, Vol. II., p. 63.

Verbal Imagination 27

mind even a single letter of the alphabet in purely retinal terms. I must trace the letter," he says, "by running my mental eye over its contour."

The various phenomena of aphasia, the cerebral disease affecting the word-consciousness, confirm these results of introspection. They show that verbal imagery is impaired by. injury to the visual, to the auditory, or to any tactual-motor centre, or by injury to the neurones connecting these areas, and that corresponding with these different pathological conditions there may be independent loss of words as read, as heard, as spoken, or as written.

Several general conclusions follow from the study of the sense-orders of our images: the impossibility, first of all, of supposing that any normal person is unimaginative. Since imagination is not of necessity an artistic impulse, a lofty soaring in empyrean isolation from the everyday life, but merely, as we have seen, the imaging of colors, sounds, pressures, odors, tastes, or even of words, it follows that everybody who is conscious of anything whatever, in its absence, is in so far imaginative. When I am conscious of the hat which I yesterday bought or of the dinner which I shall eat to-day, no less than when I muse upon the picture I shall paint or of the world I shall discover, I am, in a strict sense, imaginative. Our study, furthermore, makes it clear that almost everybody is capable of inciting himself to vivid and accurate imagination of one sort or another. If, try as he will, the colors are washed out and the outlines indistinct in his visual images of an opera or of a country outlook, he may hear, in imagination, the varying parts of strings and horns in the orchestral prelude, the melodies of the songs and the harmonies of the choruses, or the liquid bird-notes, lapping waves, and murmuring leaves of the summer afternoon. Even the minor image-types may be well developed, as the experiences of many defectives show. Helen Keller, who has been blind and deaf from earliest childhood, so that she can have neither visual nor auditory imagination, none the less imagines with peculiar vividness and detail pressures, movements, and even tastes and smells. A passage from her ^' Story of My Life " illustrates this lively and accurate imagining and may fitly close this chapter : —

"Everything," she says, "that could hum, or buzz, or sing had a part in my education — noisy-throated frogs, katydids, and crickets held in my hand till they trilled their reedy note. I felt the bursting cotton bolls and fingered their soft fibre and fuzzy seeds . . ., I felt the low soughing of the wind through the corn stalks, the silky rustling of the long leaves, and the indignant snort of my pony ... as we put the bit in his teeth. . . . Ah, me ! How well I remember the spicy, clovery smell of his breath."