Part 14

"When passing a shop in Tottenham Court Road, I went in to order a Dutch cheese, and the proprietor (a bullet-headed man whom I had never seen before) rolled a cheese on the marble slab of his counter, asking me if that one would do. I answered 'Yes,' left the shop, and thought no more of the incident. The following evening, on closing my eyes, I saw a head detached from the body rolling about slightly on a white surface. I recognised the face, but could not remember where I had seen it, and it was only after thinking about it for some time that I identified it as that of the cheesemonger who had sold me the cheese on the previous day. I may mention that I have often seen the man since, and that I found the vision I saw was exactly like him, although if I had been asked to describe the man before I saw the vision I should have been unable to do so."

Recollections need not be combined like mosaic work; they may be blended, on the principle of composite portraiture. I suspect that the phantasmagoria may be in some part due to blended memories; the number of possible combinations would be practically endless, and each combination would give a new face. There would thus be no limit to the dies in the coinage of the brain.

I have found that the peculiarities of visualisation, such as the tendency to see Number-Forms, and the still rarer tendency to associate colour with sound, is strongly hereditary, and I should infer, what facts seem to confirm, that the tendency to be a seer of visions is equally so. Under these circumstances we should expect that it would be unequally developed in different races, and that a large natural gift of the visionary faculty might become characteristic not only of certain families, as among the second-sight seers of Scotland, but of certain races, as that of the Gipsies.

It happens that the mere acts of fasting, of want of sleep, and of solitary musing, are severally conducive to visions. I have myself been told of cases in which persons accidentally long deprived of food became for a brief time subject to them. One was of a pleasure party driven out to sea, and not being able to reach the coast till nightfall, at a place where they got shelter but nothing to eat. They were mentally at ease and conscious of safety, but all were troubled with visions that were half dreams and half hallucinations. The cases of visions following protracted wakefulness are well known, and I have collected a few of them myself. I have already spoken of the maddening effect of solitariness: its influence may be inferred from the recognised advantages of social amusements in the treatment of the insane. It follows that the spiritual discipline undergone for purposes of self-control and self-mortification, have also the incidental effect of producing visions. It is to be expected that these should often bear a close relation to the prevalent subjects of thought, and although they may be really no more than the products of one portion of the brain, which another portion of the same brain is engaged in contemplating, they often, through error, receive a religious sanction. This is notably the case among half-civilised races.

The number of great men who have been once, twice, or more frequently, subject to hallucinations is considerable. A list, to which it would be easy to make large additions, is given by Brierre de Boismont (_Hallucinations_, etc., 1862), from whom I translate the following account of the star of the first Napoleon, which he heard, second-hand, from General Rapp:--

"In 1806 General Rapp, on his return from the siege of Dantzic, having occasion to speak to the Emperor, entered his study without being announced. He found him so absorbed that his entry was unperceived. The General seeing the Emperor continue motionless, thought he might be ill, and purposely made a noise. Napoleon immediately roused himself, and without any preamble, seizing Rapp by the arm, said to him, pointing to the sky, 'Look there, up there.' The General remained silent, but on being asked a second time, he answered that he perceived nothing. 'What!' replied the Emperor, 'you do not see it? It is my star, it is before you, brilliant;' then animating by degrees, he cried out, 'it has never abandoned me, I see it on all great occasions, it commands me to go forward, and it is a constant sign of good fortune to me.'"

Napoleon was no doubt a consummate actor, ready and unscrupulous in imposing on others, but I see no reason to distrust the genuineness of this particular outburst, seeing that it is not the only instance of his referring to the guidance of his star, as a literal vision and not as a mere phrase, and that his belief in destiny was notorious.

It appears that stars of this kind, so frequently spoken of in history, and so well known as a metaphor in language, are a common hallucination of the insane. Brierre de Boismont has a chapter on the stars of great men. I cannot doubt that visions of this description were in some cases the basis of that firm belief in astrology, which not a few persons of eminence formerly entertained.

The hallucinations of great men may be accounted for in part by their sharing a tendency which we have seen to be not uncommon in the human race, and which, if it happens to be natural to them, is liable to be developed in their overwrought brains by the isolation of their lives. A man in the position of the first Napoleon could have no intimate associates; a great philosopher who explores ways of thought far ahead of his contemporaries must have an inner world in which he passes long and solitary hours. Great men may be even indebted to touches of madness for their greatness; the ideas by which they are haunted, and to whose pursuit they devote themselves, and by which they rise to eminence, having much in common with the monomania of insanity. Striking instances of great visionaries may be mentioned, who had almost beyond doubt those very nervous seizures with which the tendency to hallucinations is intimately connected. To take a single instance, Socrates, whose _daimon_ was an audible not a visual appearance, was, as has been often pointed out, subject to cataleptic seizure, standing all night through in a rigid attitude.

It is remarkable how largely the visionary temperament has manifested itself in certain periods of history and epochs of national life. My interpretation of the matter, to a certain extent, is this--That the visionary tendency is much more common among sane people than is generally suspected. In early life, it seems to be a hard lesson to an imaginative child to distinguish between the real and visionary world. If the fantasies are habitually laughed at and otherwise discouraged, the child soon acquires the power of distinguishing them; any incongruity or nonconformity is quickly noted, the visions are found out and discredited, and are no further attended to. In this way the natural tendency to see them is blunted by repression. Therefore, when popular opinion is of a matter-of-fact kind, the seers of visions keep quiet; they do not like to be thought fanciful or mad, and they hide their experiences, which only come to light through inquiries such as these that I have been making. But let the tide of opinion change and grow favourable to supernaturalism, then the seers of visions come to the front. The faintly-perceived fantasies of ordinary persons become invested by the authority of reverend men with a claim to serious regard; they are consequently attended to and encouraged, and they increase in definition through being habitually dwelt upon. We need not suppose that a faculty previously non-existent has been suddenly evoked, but that a faculty long smothered by many in secret has been suddenly allowed freedom to express itself, and to run into extravagance owing to the removal of reasonable safeguards.

NURTURE AND NATURE.

Man is so educable an animal that it is difficult to distinguish between that part of his character which has been acquired through education and circumstance, and that which was in the original grain of his constitution. His character is exceedingly complex, even in members of the simplest and purest savage race; much more is it so in civilised races, who have long since been exempted from the full rigour of natural selection, and have become more mongrel in their breed than any other animal on the face of the earth. Different aspects of the multifarious character of man respond to different calls from without, so that the same individual, and, much more, the same race, may behave very differently at different epochs. There may have been no fundamental change of character, but a different phase or mood of it may have been evoked by special circumstances, or those persons in whom that mood is naturally dominant may through some accident have the opportunity of acting for the time as representatives of the race. The same nation may be seized by a military fervour at one period, and by a commercial one at another; they may be humbly submissive to a monarch, or become outrageous republicans. The love of art, gaiety, adventure, science, religion may be severally paramount at different times.

One of the most notable changes that can come over a nation is from a state corresponding to that of our past dark ages into one like that of the Renaissance. In the first case the minds of men are wholly taken up with routine work, and in copying what their predecessors have done; they degrade into servile imitators and submissive slaves to the past. In the second case, some circumstance or idea has finally discredited the authorities that impeded intellectual growth, and has unexpectedly revealed new possibilities. Then the mind of the nation is set free, a direction of research is given to it, and all the exploratory and hunting instincts are awakened. These sudden eras of great intellectual progress cannot be due to any alteration in the natural faculties of the race, because there has not been time for that, but to their being directed in productive channels. Most of the leisure of the men of every nation is spent in rounds of reiterated actions; if it could be spent in continuous advance along new lines of research in unexplored regions, vast progress would be sure to be made. It has been the privilege of this generation to have had fresh fields of research pointed out to them by Darwin, and to have undergone a new intellectual birth under the inspiration of his fertile genius.

A pure love of change, acting according to some law of contrast as yet imperfectly understood, especially characterises civilised man. After a long continuance of one mood he wants to throw himself into another for the pleasure of setting faculties into action that have been long disused, but not yet paralysed by disuse, and which have become fidgety for employment. He has so many opportunities for procuring change, and has so complex a nature that he easily learns to neglect a more deeply-seated feeling that innovation is wicked, and which is manifest in children and barbarians. To a civilised man the varied interests of civilisation are temptations in as many directions; changes in dress and appliances of all kinds are comparatively inexpensive to him owing to the cheapness of manufactures and their variety; change of scene is easy from the conveniences of locomotion. But a barbarian has none of these facilities: his interests are few; his dress, such as it is, is intended to stand the wear and tear of years, and all weathers; it is relatively very costly, and is an investment, one may say, of his capital rather than of his income; the invention of his people is sluggish, and their arts are few, consequently he is perforce taught to be conservative, his ideas are fixed, and he becomes scandalised even at the suggestion of change.

The difficulty of indulging in variety is incomparably greater among the rest of the animal world. If a pea-hen should take it into her head that bars would be prettier than eyes in the tail of her spouse, she could not possibly get what she wanted. It would require hundreds of generations in which the pea-hens generally concurred in the same view before sexual selection could effect the desired alteration. The feminine delight of indulging her caprice in matters of ornament is a luxury denied to the females of the brute world, and the law that rules changes in taste, if studied at all, can only be ascertained by observing the alternations of fashion in civilised communities.

There are long sequences of changes in character, which, like the tunes of a musical snuff-box, are regulated by internal mechanism. They are such as those of Shakespeare's "Seven Ages," and others due to the progress of various diseases. The lives of birds are characterised by long chains of these periodic sequences. They are mostly mute in winter, after that they begin to sing; some species are seized in the early part of the year with so strong a passion for migrating that if confined in a cage they will beat themselves to death against its bars; then follow courtship and pairing, accompanied by an access of ferocity among the males and severe fighting for the females. Next an impulse seizes them to build nests, then a desire for incubation, then one for the feeding of their young. After this a newly-arisen tendency to gregariousness groups them into large flocks, and finally they fly away to the place whence they came, goaded by a similar instinct to that which drove them forth a few months previously. These remarkable changes are mainly due to the conditions of their natures, because they persist with more or less regularity under altered circumstances. Nevertheless, they are not wholly independent of circumstance, because the period of migration, though nearly coincident in successive years, is modified to some small extent by the weather and condition of the particular year.

The interaction of nature and circumstance is very close, and it is impossible to separate them with precision. Nurture acts before birth, during every stage of embryonic and pre-embryonic existence, causing the potential faculties at the time of birth to be in some degree the effect of nurture. We need not, however, be hypercritical about distinctions; we know that the bulk of the respective provinces of nature and nurture are totally different, although the frontier between them may be uncertain, and we are perfectly justified in attempting to appraise their relative importance.

I shall begin with describing some of the principal influences that may safely be ascribed to education or other circumstances, all of which I include under the comprehensive term of Nurture.

ASSOCIATIONS.

The furniture of a man's mind chiefly consists of his recollections and the bonds that unite them. As all this is the fruit of experience, it must differ greatly in different minds according to their individual experiences. I have endeavoured to take stock of my own mental furniture in the way described in the next chapter, in which it will be seen how large a part consists of childish recollections, testifying to the permanent effect of many of the results of early education. The same fact has been strongly brought out by the replies from correspondents whom I had questioned on their mental imagery. It was frequently stated that the mental image invariably evoked by certain words was some event of childish experience or fancy. Thus one correspondent, of no mean literary and philosophical power, recollects the left hand by a mental reference to the rocking-horse which always stood by the side of the nursery wall with its head in the same direction, and had to be mounted from the side next the wall. Another, a politician, historian, and scholar, refers all his dates to the mental image of a nursery diagram of the history of the world, which has since developed huge bosses to support his later acquired information.

Our abstract ideas being mostly drawn from external experiences, their character also must depend upon the events of our individual histories. For example, the spoken words house and home must awaken ideas derived from the houses and the homes with which the hearer is, in one way or other, acquainted, and these could not be the same to persons of various social positions and places of residence. The character of our abstract ideas, therefore, depends, to a considerable degree, on our nurture.

I doubt, however, whether "abstract idea" is a correct phrase in many of the cases in which it is used, and whether "cumulative idea" would not be more appropriate. The ideal faces obtained by the method of composite portraiture appear to have a great deal in common with these so-called abstract ideas. The composite portraits consist, as was explained, of numerous superimposed pictures, forming a cumulative result in which the features that are common to all the likenesses are clearly seen; those that are common to a few are relatively faint and are more or less overlooked, while those that are peculiar to single individuals leave no sensible trace at all.

This analogy, which I pointed out in a Memoir on Generic Images, [11] has been extended and confirmed by subsequent experience of the process. One objection to my view was that our so-called generalisations are commonly no more than representative cases, our recollections being apt to be unduly influenced by particular events, and not by the totality of what we have seen; that the reason why some one recollection has prevailed is that the case was sharply defined, or had something unusual about it, or that our frame of mind was at the time of observation susceptible to that particular kind of impression. I have had exactly the same difficulties with the composites. If one of the individual portraits has sharp outlines, or if it is unlike the rest, or if the illumination is temporarily strong, it will assert itself unduly in the result. The cases seem to me exactly analogous. I get over my photographic difficulty very easily by throwing the sharp portrait a little out of focus, by eliminating such portraits as have exceptional features, and by toning down the illumination to a standard intensity.

[Footnote 11: "Generic Images," _Proc. Royal Institute_, Friday, April 25, 1879, partly reprinted in the Appendix.]

PSYCHOMETRIC EXPERIMENTS.

When we attempt to trace the first steps in each operation of our minds, we are usually baulked by the difficulty of keeping watch, without embarrassing the freedom of its action. The difficulty is much more than the common and well-known one of attending to two things at once. It is especially due to the fact that the elementary operations of the mind are exceedingly faint and evanescent, and that it requires the utmost painstaking to watch them properly. It would seem impossible to give the required attention to the processes of thought, and yet to think as freely as if the mind had been in no way preoccupied. The peculiarity of the experiments I am about to describe is that I have succeeded in evading this difficulty. My method consists in allowing the mind to play freely for a very brief period, until a couple or so of ideas have passed through it, and then, while the traces or echoes of those ideas are still lingering in the brain, to turn the attention upon them with a sudden and complete awakening; to arrest, to scrutinise them, and to record their exact appearance. Afterwards I collate the records at leisure, and discuss them, and draw conclusions. It must be understood that the second of the two ideas was never derived from the first, but always directly from the original object. This was ensured by absolutely withstanding all temptation to reverie. I do not mean that the first idea was of necessity a simple elementary thought; sometimes it was a glance down a familiar line of associations, sometimes it was a well-remembered mental attitude or mode of feeling, but I mean that it was never so far indulged in as to displace the object that had suggested it from being the primary topic of attention.

I must add, that I found the experiments to be extremely trying and irksome, and that it required much resolution to go through with them, using the scrupulous care they demanded. Nevertheless the results well repaid the trouble. They gave me an interesting and unexpected view of the number of the operations of the mind, and of the obscure depths in which they took place, of which I had been little conscious before. The general impression they have left upon me is like that which many of us have experienced when the basement of our house happens to be under thorough sanitary repairs, and we realise for the first time the complex system of drains and gas and water pipes, flues, bell-wires, and so forth, upon which our comfort depends, but which are usually hidden out of sight, and with whose existence, so long as they acted well, we had never troubled ourselves.