142 galton.org
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Inquiries into Human Faculty
The results that I have thus far given are hotch-pot results. It is
necessary to sort the materials somewhat before saying more about them.
After several trials I found that the associated ideas admitted of being
divided into three main groups. First there is the imagined sound of
words, as in verbal quotations or names of persons. This was frequently a
mere parrot-like memory which acted instantaneously and in a
meaningless way, just as a machine might act. In the next group there was
every other kind of sense imagery; the chime of imagined bells, the shiver
of remembered cold, the scent of some particular locality, and, much more
frequently than all the rest put together, visual imagery. The last of the
three groups contains what I will venture, for the want of a better name, to
call “histrionic” representations. It includes those cases where I either act
a part in. imagination, or see in imagination a part acted, or, most
commonly by far, where I am both spectator and all the actors at once, in
an imaginary mental theatre. Thus I feel a nascent sense of some muscular
action while I simultaneously witness a puppet of my brain—a part of
myself-perform that action, and I assume a mental attitude appropriate to
the occasion. This, in my case, is a very frequent way of generalising,
indeed I rarely feel that I have secure hold of a general idea until I have
translated it somehow into this form. Thus the word “abasement”
presented itself to me, in one of my experiments, by my mentally placing
myself in a pantomimic attitude of humiliation with half-closed eyes,
bowed head, and uplifted palms, while at the same time I was aware of
myself as of a mental puppet, in that position. This same word will serve
to illustrate the other groups also. It so happened in connection with
“abasement” that the word “David” or “King David” occurred to me on
one occasion in each of three out of the four trials; also that an accidental
misreading, or perhaps the merely punning association of the words “a
basement,” brought up on all four occasions the image of the foundations
of a house that the builders had begun upon.
So much for the character of the association; next as to that of the
words. I found, after the experiments were
