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Inquiries into Human Faculty

persons (see Appendix E). There is hardly any more difficult task than

that of framing questions which are not likely to be misunderstood, which

admit of easy reply, and which cover the ground of inquiry. I did my best

in these respects, without forgetting the most important part of all—

namely, to tempt my correspondents to write freely in fuller explanation

of their replies, and on cognate topics as well. These separate letters have

proved more instructive and interesting by far than the replies to the set

The first group of the rather long series of queries related to the

illumination, definition, and colouring of the mental image, and were

“Before addressing yourself to any of the Questions on the opposite page,

think of some definite object—suppose it is your breakfast-table as you sat down

to it this morning—and consider carefully the picture that rises before your

Illumination.—Is the image dim or fairly clear? Is its brightness

comparable to that of the actual scene?

Definition.—Are all the objects pretty well defined at the same time, or is

the place of sharpest definition at any one moment more contracted than it is in a

3. Colouring.—Are the colours of the china, of the toast, bread-crust, mustard,

meat, parsley, or whatever may have been on the table, quite distinct and

The earliest results of my inquiry amazed me. I had begun by

questioning friends in the scientific world, as they were the most likely

class of men to give accurate answers concerning this faculty of

visualising, to which novelists and poets continually allude, which has left

an abiding mark on the vocabularies of every language, and which

supplies the material out of which dreams and the well-known

hallucinations of sick people are built.

To my astonishment, I found that the great majority of the men of

science to whom I first applied protested that mental imagery was

unknown to them, and they, looked on me as fanciful and fantastic in

supposing that the words “mental imagery” really expressed what I

believed everybody supposed them to mean. They had no more notion of

its true nature than a colour-blind man, who has not discerned his defect,

has of the nature of colour. They had a mental deficiency of which they

were unaware, and