This book is characteristically French. It offers nothing new, but presents a number of psychological facts in a clear and interesting way, calculated to appeal to the unprofessional public to which it is addressed. The author has fallen into one or two mistakes,[1] owing to a too one-sided employment of authorities; in general he is accurate, if a little indiscriminating. In one point his style is defective; he shows an irritating tendency to extend and supplement the argument of the text by elaborate footnotes, which serve effectually to distract the reader's attention from the principal subject.
The psychological term "imagination" covers both the reproduction and combination of images. It is the former of these processes with which the writer is concerned. The first chapter is devoted to the consideration of the nature of images, of reproduced sensations, and of their physiological and psychological relation to the primary sensations. The law of association is then exemplified, — not in any way technically, but by a series of concrete instances. Here the value of words for our intellectual life is insisted on. Imaginations, memories, are of different kinds. Our aptitude for a particular order of perception depends upon our particular cerebral development, and this, in its turn, is conditioned by heredity. As we think in images, the images can serve as a basis of classification for pædagogical purposes; scholars will be of different "types" — normal, visual, auditory, motor. A large number of examples of the last three types is given in the three following chapters. The educator must seek to ascertain to what class a child belongs; visualization is necessary for achievement in the arts, in the natural sciences, in mathematics; auditory images are all-important for music, for languages, for poetry; motor equipment is indispensable in drawing and modelling, in elocution, in instrumentation, in feats of skill. Some practical suggestions are made in this connection.
The best type is the normal, in which the various images are more or less in equilibrium. In the other cases, substitution is impossible, and hallucination not far removed. Here, neither danger is to fear, in anything like a similar degree; while the child, though not a prodigy, has aptitude for all kinds of study. So that a relative equilibrium must be superinduced, if absent; assured, if present in promise. Again, rules are laid down, — or rather suggestions made, — which shall help bring about the desired end. The book concludes with a brief résumé of the entire argument.
- ↑ Thus Binet's authority is regarded as sufficient proof of the central seat of visual after-images (p. 15); the affective attribute of organic sensation is, as so often, over-emphasized (p. 20); the assumption of efferent sensations is wrongly ascribed to Wundt (p. 75), etc.
