Part 7

morose as to have hardly any object in associating together, besides that of mutual support. If we look at the inhabitants of the very same country as the oxen I have described, we shall find them congregated into multitudes of tribes, all more or less at war with one another. We shall find that few of these tribes are very small, and few very large, and that it is precisely those that are exceptionally large or small whose condition is the least stable. A very small tribe is sure to be overthrown, slaughtered, or driven into slavery by its more powerful neighbour. A very large tribe falls to pieces through its own unwieldiness, because, by the nature of things, it must be either deficient in centralisation or straitened in food, or both. A barbarian population is obliged to live dispersedly, since a square mile of land will support only a few hunters or shepherds; on the other hand, a barbarian government cannot be long maintained unless the chief is brought into frequent contact with his dependants, and this is geographically impossible when his tribe is so scattered as to cover a great extent of territory. The law of selection must discourage every race of barbarians which supplies self-reliant individuals in such large numbers as to cause tribes of moderate size to lose their blind desire of aggregation. It must equally discourage a breed that is incompetent to supply such men in sufficiently abundant ratio to the rest of the population to ensure the existence of tribes of not too large a size. It must not be supposed that gregarious instincts are equally important to all forms of savage life; but I hold, from what we know of the clannish fighting habits of our forefathers, that they were every whit as applicable to the earlier ancestors of our European stock as they are still to a large part of the black population of Africa.

There is, moreover, an extraordinary power of tyranny invested in the chiefs of tribes and nations of men, that so vastly outweighs the analogous power possessed by the leaders of animal herds as to rank as a special attribute of human society, eminently conducive to slavishness. If any brute in a herd makes itself obnoxious to the leader, the leader attacks him, and there is a free fight between the two, the other animals looking on the while. But if a man makes himself obnoxious to his chief, he is attacked, not by the chief single-handed, but by the overpowering force of his executive. The rebellious individual has to brave a disciplined host; there are spies who will report his doings, a local authority who will send a detachment of soldiers to drag him to trial; there are prisons ready built to hold him, civil authorities wielding legal powers of stripping him of all his possessions, and official executioners prepared to torture or kill him. The tyrannies under which men have lived, whether under rude barbarian chiefs, under the great despotisms of half-civilised Oriental countries, or under some of the more polished but little less severe governments of modern days, must have had a frightful influence in eliminating independence of character from the human race. Think of Austria, of Naples, and even of France under Napoleon III. It was stated[1] in 1870 that, according to papers found at the Tuileries, 26,642 persons had been arrested in France for political offences since 2nd December, 1851, and that 14,118 had been transported, exiled, or detained in prison.

I have already spoken in _Hereditary Genius_ of the large effects of religious persecution in comparatively recent years, on the natural character of races, and shall not say more about it here; but it must not be omitted from the list of steady influences continuing through ancient historical times down, in some degree, to the present day, in destroying the self-reliant, and therefore the nobler races of men.

I hold that the blind instincts evolved under these long-continued conditions have been ingrained into our breed, and that they are a bar to our enjoying the freedom which the forms of modern civilisation are otherwise capable of giving us. A really intelligent nation might be held together by far stronger forces than are derived from the purely gregarious instincts. A nation need not be a mob of slaves, clinging to one another through fear, and for the most part incapable of self-government, and begging to be led; but it might consist of vigorous self-reliant men, knit to one [6] another by innumerable ties, into a strong, tense, and elastic organisation.

[Footnote 6: _Daily News_, 17th October, 1870.]

* * * * *

The character of the corporate action of a nation in which each man judges for himself, might be expected to possess statistical constancy. It would be the expression of the dominant character of a large number of separate members of the same race, and ought therefore to be remarkably uniform. Fickleness of national character is principally due to the several members of the nation exercising no independent judgment, but allowing themselves to be led hither and thither by the successive journalists, orators, and sentimentalists who happen for the time to have the chance of directing them.

Our present natural dispositions make it impossible for us to attain the ideal standard of a nation of men all judging soberly for themselves, and therefore the slavishness of the mass of our countrymen, in morals and intellect, must be an admitted fact in all schemes of regenerative policy.

The hereditary taint due to the primeval barbarism of our race, and maintained by later influences, will have to be bred out of it before our descendants can rise to the position of free members of an intelligent society: and I may add that the most likely nest at the present time for self-reliant natures is to be found in States founded and maintained by emigrants.

Servility has its romantic side, in the utter devotion of a slave to the lightest wishes and the smallest comforts of his master, and in that of a loyal subject to those of his sovereign; but such devotion cannot be called a reasonable self-sacrifice; it is rather an abnegation of the trust imposed on man to use his best judgment, and to act in the way he thinks the wisest. Trust in authority is a trait of the character of children, of weakly women, and of the sick and infirm, but it is out of place among members of a thriving resolute community during the fifty or more years of their middle life. Those who have been born in a free country feel the atmosphere of a paternal government very oppressive. The hearty and earnest political and individual life which is found when every man has a continual sense of public responsibility, and knows that success depends on his own right judgment and exertion, is replaced under a despotism by an indolent reliance upon what its master may direct, and by a demoralising conviction that personal advancement is best secured by solicitations and favour.

INTELLECTUAL DIFFERENCES.

It is needless for me to speak here about the differences in intellectual power between different men and different races, or about the convertibility of genius as shown by different members of the same gifted family achieving eminence in varied ways, as I have already written at length on these subjects in _Hereditary Genius_ and in _Antecedents of English Men of Science_. It is, however, well to remark that during the fourteen years that have elapsed since the former book was published, numerous fresh instances have arisen of distinction being attained by members of the gifted families whom I quoted as instances of heredity, thus strengthening my arguments.

MENTAL IMAGERY.

Anecdotes find their way into print, from time to time, of persons whose visual memory is so clear and sharp as to present mental pictures that may be scrutinised with nearly as much ease and prolonged attention as if they were real objects. I became interested in the subject and made a rather extensive inquiry into the mode of visual presentation in different persons, so far as could be gathered from their respective statements. It seemed to me that the results might illustrate the essential differences between the mental operations of different men, that they might give some clue to the origin of visions, and that the course of the inquiry might reveal some previously unnoticed facts. It has done all this more or less, and I will explain the results in the present and in the three following chapters.

It is not necessary to trouble the reader with my earlier tentative steps to find out what I desired to learn. After the inquiry had been fairly started it took the form of submitting a certain number of printed questions to a large number of persons (see Appendix E). There is hardly any more difficult task than that of framing questions which are not likely to be misunderstood, which admit of easy reply, and which cover the ground of inquiry. I did my best in these respects, without forgetting the most important part of all--namely, to tempt my correspondents to write freely in fuller explanation of their replies, and on cognate topics as well. These separate letters have proved more instructive and interesting by far than the replies to the set questions.

The first group of the rather long series of queries related to the illumination, definition, and colouring of the mental image, and were framed thus:--

"Before addressing yourself to any of the Questions on the opposite page, think of some definite object--suppose it is your breakfast-table as you sat down to it this morning--and consider carefully the picture that rises before your mind's eye."

1. _Illumination_.--Is the image dim or fairly clear? Is its brightness comparable to that of the actual scene?

2. _Definition_.--Are all the objects pretty well defined at the same time, or is the place of sharpest definition at any one moment more contracted than it is in a real scene?

3. _Colouring_.--Are the colours 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 visualising, 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 was 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 colour-blind man, who has not discerned his defect, has of the nature of colour. 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 larger number of women, and many boys and girls, declared that they habitually saw mental imagery, and that it was perfectly distinct to them and full of colour. The more I pressed and cross-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 the replies that are the main subject of this and of the three next chapters. They were from persons of both sexes, and of various ages, and in the end from occasional correspondents in nearly every civilised 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: the one is the proved facility of obtaining statistical insight into the processes of other persons' minds, whatever _à priori_ objection may have been made as to its possibility; and the other is that scientific men, as a class, have feeble powers of visual representation. There is no doubt whatever on the latter point, however it may be accounted for. My own conclusion is, that an over-ready perception of sharp mental pictures is antagonistic to the acquirement of habits of highly-generalised and abstract thought, especially when the steps of reasoning are carried on by words as symbols, and that if the faculty of seeing the pictures was ever possessed by men who think hard, it is very apt to be lost by disuse. The highest minds are probably those in which it is not lost, but subordinated, and is ready for use on suitable occasions. I am, however, bound to say, that the missing faculty seems to be replaced so serviceably by other modes of conception, chiefly, I believe, connected with the incipient motor sense, not of the eyeballs only but of the muscles generally, that men who declare themselves entirely deficient in the power of seeing mental pictures can nevertheless give life-like descriptions of what they have seen, and can otherwise express themselves as if they were gifted with a vivid visual imagination. They can also become painters of the rank of Royal Academicians.

The facts I am now about to relate are obtained from the returns of 100 adult men, of whom 19 are Fellows of the Royal Society, mostly of very high repute, and at least twice, and I think I may say three times, as many more are persons of distinction in various kinds of intellectual work. As already remarked, these returns taken by themselves do not profess to be of service in a general statistical sense, but they are of much importance in showing how men of exceptional accuracy express themselves when they are speaking of mental imagery. They also testify to the variety of experiences to be met with in a moderately large circle. I will begin by giving a few cases of the highest, of the medium, and of the lowest order of the faculty of visualising. The hundred returns were first classified according to the order of the faculty, as judged to the best of my ability from the whole of what was said in them, and of what I knew from other sources of the writers; and the number prefixed to each quotation shows its place in the class-list.

VIVIDNESS OF MENTAL IMAGERY.

(From returns, furnished by 100 men, at least half of whom are distinguished in science or in other fields of intellectual work.)

_Cases where the faculty is very high_.

1. Brilliant, distinct, never blotchy.

2. Quite comparable to the real object. I feel as though I was dazzled, _e.g._ when recalling the sun to my mental vision.

3. In some instances quite as bright as an actual scene.

4. Brightness as in the actual scene.

5. Thinking of the breakfast-table this morning, all the objects in my mental picture are as bright as the actual scene.

6. The image once seen is perfectly clear and bright.

7. Brightness at first quite comparable to actual scene.

8. The mental image appears to correspond in all respects with reality. I think it is as clear as the actual scene.

9. The brightness is perfectly comparable to that of the real scene.

10. I think the illumination of the imaginary image is nearly equal to that of the real one.

11. All clear and bright; all the objects seem to me well defined at the same time.

12. I can see my breakfast-table or any equally familiar thing with my mind's eye, quite as well in all particulars as I can do if the reality is before me.

_Cases where the faculty is mediocre_.

46. Fairly clear and not incomparable in illumination with that of the real scene, especially when I first catch it. Apt to become fainter when more particularly attended to.

47. Fairly clear, not quite comparable to that of the actual scene. Some objects are more sharply defined than others, the more familiar objects coming more distinctly in my mind.

48. Fairly clear as a general image; details rather misty.

49. Fairly clear, but not equal to the scene. Defined, but not sharply; not all seen with equal clearness.

50. Fairly clear. Brightness probably at least one-half to two-thirds of original. [The writer is a physiologist.] Definition varies very much, one or two objects being much more distinct than the others, but the latter come out clearly if attention be paid to them.

51. Image of my breakfast-table fairly clear, but not quite so bright as the reality. Altogether it is pretty well defined; the part where I sit and its surroundings are pretty well so.

52. Fairly clear, but brightness not comparable to that of the actual scene. The objects are sharply defined; some of them are salient, and others insignificant and dim, but by separate efforts I can take a visualised inventory of the whole table.

53. Details of breakfast-table _when the scene is reflected on_ are fairly defined and complete, but I have had a familiarity of many years with my own breakfast-table, and the above would not be the case with a table seen casually unless there were some striking peculiarity in it,

54. I can recall any single object or group of objects, but not the whole table at once. The things recalled are generally clearly defined. Our table is a long one; I can in my mind pass my eyes all down the table and see the different things distinctly, but not the whole table at once.

_Cases where the faculty is at the lowest_.

89. Dim and indistinct, yet I can give an account of this morning's breakfast-table; split herrings, broiled chickens, bacon, rolls, rather light-coloured marmalade, faint green plates with stiff pink flowers, the girls' dresses, etc. etc. I can also tell where all the dishes were, and where the people sat (I was on a visit). But my imagination is seldom pictorial except between sleeping and waking, when I sometimes see rather vivid forms.

90. Dim and not comparable in brightness to the real scene. Badly defined with blotches of light; very incomplete.

91. Dim, poor definition; could not sketch from it. I have a difficulty in seeing two images together.

92. Usually very dim. I cannot speak of its brightness, but only of its faintness. Not well defined and very incomplete.

93. Dim, imperfect.

94. I am very rarely able to recall any object whatever with any sort of distinctness. Very occasionally an object or image will recall itself, but even then it is more like a generalised image than an individual image. I seem to be almost destitute of visualising power, as under control.

95. No power of visualising. Between sleeping and waking, in illness and in health, with eyes closed, some remarkable scenes have occasionally presented themselves, but I cannot recall them when awake with eyes open, and by daylight, or under any circumstances whatever when a copy could be made of them on paper. I have drawn both men and places many days or weeks after seeing them, but it was by an effort of memory acting on study at the time, and assisted by trial and error on the paper or canvas, whether in black, yellow, or colour, afterwards.

96. It is only as 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." ... The memory possesses it, and the mind can at will roam over the whole, or study minutely any part.

97. No individual objects, only a general idea of a very uncertain kind.

98. No. My memory is not of the nature of a spontaneous vision, though I remember well where a word occurs in a page, how furniture looks in a room, etc. The ideas not felt to be mental pictures, but rather the symbols of facts.

99. Extremely dim. The impressions are in all respects so dim, vague, and transient, that I doubt whether they can reasonably be called images. They are incomparably less than those of dreams.

100. My powers are zero. To my consciousness there is almost no association of memory with objective visual impressions. I recollect the breakfast-table, but do not see it.