Part 8

These quotations clearly show the great variety of natural powers of visual representation, and though the returns from which they are taken have, as I said, no claim to be those of 100 Englishmen taken at haphazard, nevertheless, to the best of my judgment, they happen to differ among themselves in much the same way that such returns would have done. I cannot procure a strictly haphazard series for comparison, because in any group of persons whom I may question there are always many too indolent to reply, or incapable of expressing themselves, or who from some fancy of their own are unwilling to reply. Still, as already mentioned, I have got together several groups that approximate to what is wanted, usually from schools, and I have analysed them as well as I could, and the general result is that the above returns may be accepted as a fair representation of the visualising powers of Englishmen. Treating these according to the method described in the chapter of statistics, we have the following results, in which, as a matter of interest, I have also recorded the highest and the lowest of the series:--

_Highest_.--Brilliant, distinct, never blotchy.

* * * * *

_First Suboctile_.--The image once seen is perfectly clear and bright.

_First Octile_.--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.

_First Quartile_--Fairly clear; illumination of actual scene is fairly represented. Well defined. Parts do not obtrude themselves, but attention has to be directed to different points in succession to call up the whole.

_Middlemost_.--Fairly clear. Brightness probably at least from one-half to two-thirds of the original. 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.

_Last Quartile_.--Dim, certainly not comparable to the actual scene. I have to think separately of the several things on the table to bring them clearly before the mind's eye, and when I think of some things the others fade away in confusion.

_Last Octile_.--Dim and not comparable in brightness to the real scene. Badly defined, with blotches of light; very incomplete; very little of one object is seen at one time.

_Last Suboctile_.--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 one. I seem to be almost destitute of visualising power as under control.

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

I next proceed to colour, as specified in the third of my questions, and annex a selection from the returns classified on the same principle as in the preceding paragraph.

COLOUR REPRESENTATION.

_Highest_.--Perfectly distinct, bright, and natural.

_First Suboctile_.--White cloth, blue china, argand coffee-pot, buff stand with sienna drawing, toast--all clear.

_First Octile_.--All details seen perfectly.

_First Quartile_.--Colours distinct and natural till I begin to puzzle over them.

_Middlemost_.--Fairly distinct, though not certain that they are accurately recalled.

_Last Quartile_.--Natural, but very indistinct.

_Last Octile_.--Faint; can only recall colours by a special effort for each.

_Last Suboctile_.--Power is nil.

_Lowest_.--Power is nil.

It may seem surprising that one out of every sixteen persons who are accustomed to use accurate expressions should speak of their mental imagery as perfectly clear and bright; but it is so, and many details are added in various returns emphasising the assertion. One of the commonest of these is to the effect, "If I could draw, I am sure I could draw perfectly from my mental image." That some artists, such as Blake, have really done so is beyond dispute, but I have little doubt that there is an unconscious exaggeration in these returns. My reason for saying so is that I have also returns from artists, who say as follows: "My imagery is so clear, that if I had been unable to draw I should have unhesitatingly said that I could draw from it." A foremost painter of the present day has used that expression. He finds deficiencies and gaps when he tries to draw from his mental vision. There is perhaps some analogy between these images and those of "faces in the fire." One may often fancy an exceedingly well-marked face or other object in the burning coals, but probably everybody will find, as I have done, that it is impossible to draw it, for as soon as its outlines are seriously studied, the fancy flies away.

Mr. Flinders Petrie, a contributor of interesting experiments on kindred subjects to _Nature_, informs me that he habitually works out sums by aid of an imaginary sliding rule, which he sets in the desired way and reads off mentally. He does not usually visualise the whole rule, but only that part of it with which he is at the moment concerned (see Plate II. Fig. 34, where, however, the artist has not put in the divisions very correctly). I think this is one of the most striking cases of accurate visualising power it is possible to imagine.

I have a few returns from chess-players who play games blindfolded; but the powers of such men to visualise the separate boards with different sets of men on the different boards, some ivory, some wood, and so forth, are well known, and I need not repeat them. I will rather give the following extract from an article in the _Pall Mall Gazette_, 27th June 1882, on the recent chess tournament at Vienna:--

"The modern feats of blindfold play (without sight of board) greatly surpass those of twenty years ago. Paul Morphy, the American, was the first who made an especial study of this kind of display, playing some seven or eight games blindfold and simultaneously against various inferior opponents, and making lucrative exhibitions in this way. His abilities in this line created a scare among other rivals who had not practised this test of memory. Since his day many chess-players who are gifted with strong and clear memory and power of picturing to the mind the ideal board and men, have carried this branch of exhibition play far beyond Morphy's pitch; and, contemporaneously with this development, it has become acknowledged that skill in blindfold play is not an absolute test of similarly relative powers over the board: _e.g._ Blackburne and Zukertort can play as many as sixteen, or even twenty, blindfold games at a time, and win about 80 per cent of them at least. Steinitz, who beats them both in match play, does not essay more than six blindfold at a time. Mason does not, to our knowledge, make any _spécialité_ at all of this sort."

I have many cases of persons mentally reading off scores when playing the pianoforte, or manuscript when they are making speeches. One statesman has assured me that a certain hesitation in utterance which he has at times, is due to his being plagued by the image of his manuscript speech with its original erasures and corrections. He cannot lay the ghost, and he puzzles in trying to decipher it.

Some few persons see mentally in print every word that is uttered; they attend to the visual equivalent and not to the sound of the words, and they read them off usually as from a long imaginary strip of paper, such as is unwound from telegraphic instruments. The experiences differ in detail as to size and kind of type, colour of paper, and so forth, but are always the same in the same person.

A well-known frequenter of the Royal Institution tells me that he often craves for an absence of visual perceptions, they are so brilliant and persistent. The Rev. George Henslow speaks of their extreme restlessness; they oscillate, rotate, and change.

It is a mistake to suppose that sharp sight is accompanied by clear visual memory. I have not a few instances in which the independence of the two faculties is emphatically commented on; and I have at least one clear case where great interest in outlines and accurate appreciation of straightness, squareness, and the like, is unaccompanied by the power of visualising. Neither does the faculty go with dreaming. I have cases where it is powerful, and at the same time where dreams are rare and faint or altogether absent. One friend tells me that his dreams have not the hundredth part of the vigour of his waking fancies.

The visualising and the identifying powers are by no means necessarily combined. A distinguished writer on meta-physical topics assures me that he is exceptionally quick at recognising a face that he has seen before, but that he cannot call up a mental image of any face with clearness.

Some persons have the power of combining in a single perception more than can be seen at any one moment by the two eyes. It is needless to insist on the fact that all who have two eyes see stereoscopically, and therefore somewhat round a corner. Children, who can focus their eyes on very near objects, must be able to comprise in a single mental image much more than a half of any small object they are examining. Animals such as hares, whose eyes are set more on the side of the head than ours, must be able to perceive at one and the same instant more of a panorama than we can. I find that a few persons can, by what they often describe as a kind of touch-sight, visualise at the same moment all round the image of a solid body. Many can do so nearly, but not altogether round that of a terrestrial globe. An eminent mineralogist assures me that he is able to imagine simultaneously all the sides of a crystal with which he is familiar. I may be allowed to quote a curious faculty of my own in respect to this. It is exercised only occasionally and in dreams, or rather in nightmares, but under those circumstances I am perfectly conscious of embracing an entire sphere in a single perception. It appears to lie within my mental eyeball, and to be viewed centripetally.

This power of comprehension is practically attained in many cases by indirect methods. It is a common feat to take in the whole surroundings of an imagined room with such a rapid mental sweep as to leave some doubt whether it has not been viewed simultaneously. Some persons have the habit of viewing objects as though they were

## partly transparent; thus, if they so dispose a globe in their

imagination as to see both its north and south poles at the same time, they will not be able to see its equatorial parts. They can also perceive all the rooms of an imaginary house by a single mental glance, the walls and floors being as if made of glass. A fourth class of persons have the habit of recalling scenes, not from the point of view whence they were observed, but from a distance, and they visualise their own selves as actors on the mental stage. By one or other of these ways, the power of seeing the whole of an object, and not merely one aspect of it, is possessed by many persons.

The place where the image appears to lie, differs much. Most persons see it in an indefinable sort of way, others see it in front of the eye, others at a distance corresponding to reality. There exists a power which is rare naturally, but can, I believe, be acquired without much difficulty, of projecting a mental picture upon a piece of paper, and of holding it fast there, so that it can be outlined with a pencil. To this I shall recur.

Images usually do not become stronger by dwelling on them; the first idea is commonly the most vigorous, but this is not always the case. Sometimes the mental view of a locality is inseparably connected with the sense of its position as regards the points of the compass, real or imaginary. I have received full and curious descriptions from very different sources of this strong geographical tendency, and in one or two cases I have reason to think it allied to a considerable faculty of geographical comprehension.

The power of visualising is higher in the female sex than in the male, and is somewhat, but not much, higher in public schoolboys than in men. After maturity is reached, the further advance of age does not seem to dim the faculty, but rather the reverse, judging from numerous statements to that effect; but advancing years are sometimes accompanied by a growing habit of hard abstract thinking, and in these cases--not uncommon among those whom I have questioned--the faculty undoubtedly becomes impaired. There is reason to believe that it is very high in some young children, who seem to spend years of difficulty in distinguishing between the subjective and objective world. Language and book-learning certainly tend to dull it.

The visualising faculty is a natural gift, and, like all natural gifts, has a tendency to be inherited. In this faculty the tendency to inheritance is exceptionally strong, as I have abundant evidence to prove, especially in respect to certain rather rare peculiarities, of which I shall speak in the next chapter, and which, when they exist at all, are usually found among two, three, or more brothers and sisters, parents, children, uncles and aunts, and cousins.

Since families differ so much in respect to this gift, we may suppose that races would also differ, and there can be no doubt that such is the case. I hardly like to refer to civilised nations, because their natural faculties are too much modified by education to allow of their being appraised in an off-hand fashion. I may, however, speak of the French, who appear to possess the visualising faculty in a high degree. The peculiar ability they show in prearranging ceremonials _fêtes_ of all kinds, and their undoubted genius for tactics and strategy, show that they are able to foresee effects with unusual clearness. Their ingenuity in all technical contrivances is an additional testimony in the same direction, and so is their singular clearness of expression. Their phrase, "figurez-vous," or "picture to yourself," seems to express their dominant mode of perception. Our equivalent of "imagine" is ambiguous.

It is among uncivilised races that natural differences in the visualising faculty are most conspicuous. Many of them make carvings and rude illustrations, but only a few have the gift of carrying a picture in their mind's eye, judging by the completeness and firmness of their designs, which show no trace of having been elaborated in that step-by-step manner which is characteristic of draughtsmen who are not natural artists.

Among the races who are thus gifted are the commonly despised, but, as I confidently maintain from personal knowledge of them, the much underrated Bushmen of South Africa. They are no doubt deficient in the natural instincts necessary to civilisation, for they detest a regular life, they are inveterate thieves, and are incapable of withstanding the temptation of strong drink. On the other hand, they have few superiors among barbarians in the ingenious methods by which they supply the wants of a difficult existence, and in the effectiveness and nattiness of their accoutrements. One of their habits is to draw pictures on the walls of caves of men and animals, and to colour them with ochre. These drawings were once numerous, but they have been sadly destroyed by advancing colonisation, and few of them, and indeed few wild Bushmen, now exist. Fortunately a large and valuable collection of facsimiles of Bushman art was made before it became too late by Mr. Stow, of the Cape Colony, who has very lately sent some specimens of them to this country, in the hope that means might be found for the publication of the entire series. Among the many pictures of animals in each of the large sheets full of them, I was particularly struck with one of an eland as giving a just idea of the precision and purity of their best work. Others, again, were exhibited last summer at the Anthropological Institute by Mr. Hutchinson.

The method by which the Bushmen draw is described in the following extract from a letter written to me by Dr. Mann, the well-known authority on South African matters of science. The boy to whom he refers belonged to a wild tribe living in caves in the Drakenberg, who plundered outlying farms, and were pursued by the neighbouring colonists. He was wounded and captured, then sent to hospital, and subsequently taken into service. He was under Dr. Mann's observation in the year 1860, and has recently died, to the great regret of his employer, Mr. Proudfoot, to whom he became a valuable servant.

Dr. Mann writes as follows:--

"This lad was very skilful in the proverbial Bushman art of drawing animal figures, and upon several occasions I induced him to show me how this was managed among his people. He invariably began by jotting down upon paper or on a slate a number of isolated dots which presented no connection or trace of outline of any kind to the uninitiated eye, but looked like the stars scattered promiscuously in the sky. Having with much deliberation satisfied himself of the sufficiency of these dots, he forthwith began to run a free bold line from one to the other, and as he did so the form of an animal--horse, buffalo, elephant, or some kind of antelope--gradually developed itself. This was invariably done with a free hand, and with such unerring accuracy of touch, that no correction of a line was at any time attempted. I understood from the lad that this was the plan which was invariably pursued by his kindred in making their clever pictures."

It is impossible, I think, for a drawing to be made on this method unless the artist had a clear image in his mind's eye of what he was about to draw, and was able, in some degree, to project it on the paper or slate.

Other living races have the gift of drawing, but none more so than the Eskimo. I will therefore speak of these and not of the Australian and Tasmanian pictures, nor of the still ruder performances of the old inhabitants of Guiana, nor of those of some North American tribes, as the Iroquois. The Eskimos are geographers by instinct, and appear to see vast tracts of country mapped out in their heads. From the multitude of illustrations of their map-drawing powers, I may mention one of those included in the journals of Captain Hall, at p. 224, which were published in 1879 by the United States Government, under the editorship of Professor J. E. Nourse. It is the facsimile of a chart drawn by an Eskimo who was a thorough barbarian in the accepted sense of the word; that is to say, he spoke no language besides his own uncouth tongue, he was wholly uneducated according to our modern ideas, and he lived in what we should call a savage fashion. This man drew from memory a chart of the region over which he had at one time or another gone in his canoe. It extended from Pond's Bay, in lat. 73°, to Fort Churchill, in lat. 58°44', over a distance in a straight line of more than 960 nautical, or 1100 English miles, the coast being so indented by arms of the sea that its length is six times as great. On comparing this rough Eskimo outline with the Admiralty chart of 1870, their accordance is remarkable. I have seen many MS. route maps made by travellers a few years since, when the scientific exploration of the world was much less advanced than it is now, and I can confidently say that I have never known of any traveller, white or brown, civilised or uncivilised, in Africa, Asia, or Australia, who, being unprovided with surveying instruments, and trusting to his memory alone, has produced a chart comparable in extent and accuracy to that of this barbarous Eskimo. The aptitude of the Eskimos to draw, is abundantly shown by the numerous illustrations in Rink's work, all of which were made by self-taught men, and are thoroughly realistic.

So much for the wild races of the present day; but even the Eskimo are equalled in their power of drawing by the men of old times. In ages so far gone by, that the interval that separates them from our own may be measured in perhaps hundreds of thousands of years, when Europe was mostly icebound, a race who, in the opinion of all anthropologists, was closely allied to the modern Eskimo, lived in caves in the more habitable places. Many broken relics of that race have been found; some few of these are of bone engraved with flints or carved into figures, and among these are representations of the mammoth, elk, and reindeer, which, if made by an English labourer with the much better implements at his command, would certainly attract local attention and lead to his being properly educated, and in much likelihood to his becoming a considerable artist if he had intellectual powers to match.

It is not at all improbable that these prehistoric men had the same geographical instincts as the modern Eskimo, whom they closely resemble in every known respect. If so, it is perfectly possible that scraps of charts scratched on bone or stone, of prehistoric Europe, when the distribution of land, sea, and ice was very different to what it is now, may still exist, buried underground, and may reward the zeal of some future cave explorer.

There is abundant evidence that the visualising faculty admits of being developed by education. The testimony on which I would lay especial stress is derived from the published experiences of M. Lecoq de Boisbaudran, late director of the École Nationale de Dessein, in Paris, which are related in his _Education de la M. émoire Pittoresque_ [1] He trained his pupils with extraordinary success, beginning with the simplest figures. They were made to study the models thoroughly before they tried to draw them from memory. One favourite expedient was to associate the sight memory with the muscular memory, by making his pupils follow at a distance the outlines of the figures with a pencil held in their hands. After three or four months' practice, their visual memory became greatly strengthened. They had no difficulty in summoning images at will, in holding them steady, and in drawing them. Their copies [7] were executed with marvellous fidelity, as attested by a commission of the Institute, appointed in 1852 to inquire into the matter, of which the eminent painter Horace Vernet was a member. The present Slade Professor of Fine Arts at University College, M. Légros, was a pupil of M. de Boisbaudran. He has expressed to me his indebtedness to the system, and he has assured me of his own success in teaching others in a somewhat similar way.

[Footnote 7: Republished in an 8vo, entitled _Enseignment Artistique_. Morel et Cie. Paris, 1879.]

Colonel Moncrieff informs me that, when wintering in 1877 near Fort Garry in North America, young Indians occasionally came to his quarters, and that he found them much interested in any pictures or prints that were put before them. On one of these occasions he saw an Indian tracing the outline of a print from the _Illustrated News_ very carefully with the point of his knife. The reason he gave for this odd manoeuvre was, that he would remember the better how to carve it when he returned home.