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Mental Imagery
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the right or left, upward or downward. It selects images that present the
same aspect, either by a simple act of memory or by a feat of imagination
that forces them into the desired position, and it has little or no difficulty
in reversing them from right to left, as if seen in a looking-glass. In
illustration of these generalised mental images, let us recur to the boat,
and suppose the speaker to continue as follows :—“ The boat was a four-
oared racing-boat, it was passing quickly to the left just in front of me,
and the men were bending forward to take a fresh stroke.” Now at this
point of the story the listener ought to have a picture well before his eye.
It ought to have the distinctness of a real four-oar going to the left, at the
moment when many of its details still remained unheeded, such as the
dresses of the men and their individual features. It would be the generic
image of a four-oar formed by the combination into a single picture of a
great many sight memories of those boats.
In the highest minds a descriptive word is sufficient to evoke crowds
of shadowy associations, each striving to manifest itself. When they differ
so much from one another as to be unfitted for combination into a single
idea, there will be a conflict, each being prevented by the rest from
obtaining sole possession of the field of consciousness. There could,
therefore, be no definite imagery so long as the aggregate of all the
pictures that the word suggested of objects presenting similar aspects,
reduced to the same size, and accurately superposed, resulted in a blur;
but a picture would gradually evolve as qualifications were added to the
word, and it would attain to the distinctness and vividness of a generic
image long before the word had been so restricted as to be individualised.
If the intellect be slow, though correct in its operations, the associations
will be few, and the generalised image based on insufficient data. If the
visualising power be faint, the generalised image will be indistinct.
I cannot discover any closer relation between high visualising power
and the intellectual faculties than between verbal memory and those same
faculties. That it must afford immense help in some professions stands to
reason, but in ordinary social life the possession of a high visualising
power, as of a high verbal memory, may pass quite unobserved.
