call it "histrionic." I find it to be a most important agent in creating generalizations.
The second group of ideas consists of mere sense imagery, unaccompanied by any obscure feeling of muscular tension or action: such as mental landscapes, sounds, tastes, etc. I showed, in a paper read before the Anthropological Society last year,[1] how generalized images admitted of being produced. I took a number of portraits of different persons, who were all represented in the same attitudes and of the same size, and I threw photographic images of these, one on the top of the other, by a contrivance there described, on the same sensitized photographic plates. The result was a picture compounded of that of all the different persons; and so much more numerous are the points of resemblance than those of dissimilarity in different human faces, that the composite picture looked as though it had been taken from a real living individual a little out of focus, and who had somewhat moved during the process. I then pointed out that "a composite portrait represents the picture that would rise before the mind's eye of a man who had the gift of pictorial imagination in the highest degree." It is clear, from the evidence of these composites, that generalized images are no chimeras.
So much for the second group of ideas. The third and last group consisted of purely verbal associations, whether the mere names of persons or things, or bits of quotations in prose or verse.
The seventy-five words were similarly divisible into three groups. The first included such words as "abasement," "abhorrence, "adoration," and "acclamation," all of which could be perfectly expressed in pantomime, and generally gave rise to histrionic ideas. The second group comprised "abbey," "aborigines," abyss," and the like, all of which admitted of sense representation, either by a visual image, or, in the case of such a word as "acid," by some other sense. In the third group were the words "afternoon," "ability," "absence," "actuality," and others of a like abstract character, difficult to apprehend and realize, and tending to give rise to purely verbal associations. But as two ideas were registered on each occasion, the eight results were usually dispersed among all the groups, though in unequal proportions.
Experiments such as these allow an unexpected amount of illumination to enter into the deepest recesses of the character, which are opened and bared by them like the anatomy of an animal under the scalpel of a dissector in broad daylight. If we had records of the self examination of many persons, and compared them, I think we should be much impressed by the differences between one mind and another, in the quality, wealth, and appropriateness of their associated ideas, and we should wonder that mutual misunderstandings were not more frequent even than they are.
- ↑ "Journal of the Anthropological Institute," viii., p. 134; or "Nature," May 23, 1878, p. 97.
