" '3.Coloring.-Are the colors of the china, of the toast, bread-crust, mustard, meat, parsley, or whatever may have been on the table, quite distinct and natural?'
"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 visual- izing, 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 way 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 color-blind man, who has not discerned his defect, has of the nature of color.They had a mental deficiency of which they were unaware, and naturally enough supposed that those who affirmed they possessed it were romancing.To illustrate their mental attitude it will be sufficient to quote a few lines from the letter of one of my correspondents, who writes:
"These questions presuppose assent to some sort of a proposition regarding the "mind's eye," and the "images" which it sees....This points to some initial fallacy....It is only by a figure of speech that I can describe my recollection of a scene as a "mental image" which I can "see" with my "mind's eye."...I do not see it...any more than a man sees the thousand lines of Sophocles which under due pressure he is ready to repeat.The memory possesses it,' etc.
"Much the same result followed inquiries made for me by a friend among members of the French Institute.
"On the other hand, when I spoke to persons whom I met in general society, I found an entirely different disposition to prevail.Many men and a yet large number of women, and many boys and girls, declared that they habitually saw mental imagery, and that it way perfectly distinct to them and full of color.The more I pressed and crossed-questioned them, professing myself to be incredulous, the more obvious was the truth of their first assertions.They described their imagery in minute detail, and they spoke in a tone of surprise at my apparent hesitation in accepting what they said.I felt that I myself should have spoken exactly as they did if I had been describing a scene that lay before my eyes, in broad daylight, to a blind man who persisted in doubting the reality of vision.Reassured by this happier experience, I recommenced to inquire among" scientific men, and soon found scattered instances of what I sought, though in by no means the same abundance as elsewhere.I then circulated my questions more generally among my friends and through their hands, and obtained replies...from persons of both sexes, and of various ages, and in the end from occasional correspondents in nearly every civilized country.
"I have also received batches of answers from various educational establishments both in England and America, which were made after the masters had fully explained the meaning of the questions, and interested the boys in them.These have the merit of returns derived from a general census, which my other data lack, because I cannot for a moment suppose that the writers of the latter are a haphazard proportion of those to whom they were sent.Indeed I know of some who, disavowing all possession of the power, and of many others who, possessing it in too faint a degree to enable them to express what their experiences really were, in a manner satisfactory to themselves, sent no returns at all.Considerable statistical similarity was, however, observed between the sets of returns furnished by the schoolboys and those sent by my separate correspondents, and I may add that they accord in this respect with the oral information I have elsewhere obtained.The conformity of replies from so many different sources which was clear from the first, the fact of their apparent trustworthiness being on the whole much increased by cross-examination (though I could give one or two amusing instances of break-down), and the evident effort made to give accurate answers, have convinced me that it is a much easier matter than I had anticipated to obtain trustworthy replies to psychological questions.Many persons, especially women and intelligent children, take pleasure in introspection, and strive their very best to explain their mental processes.I think that a delight in self-dissection must be a strong ingredient in the pleasure that many are said to take in confessing themselves to priests.
"Here, then, are two rather notable results:
