A first book in psychology / by Mary Whiton Calkins.

  • Mary Whiton Calkins
Date:
1910
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A first book in psychology / by Mary Whiton Calkins. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    moving in their courses, peoples the earth with the forms of animals long extinct, or makes of every common object a palpitating dance of atoms and subatoms. Even a poet’s imagination may hesitate before the challenging hypotheses of science, for it is said that Wordsworth once exclaimed, “I have not enough imagination to become a geologist.” Yet in spite of the value of visual images to artists, inventors, and mathematicians, it must at once be acknowledged that, even to them, the visual type of imagination is not indispen¬ sable, but that it may be replaced by what we know as the tactual-motor type, the imaging of the movements by which one traces the outlines of figures or of designs. Galton found, as result of careful inquiry, that “men who declare themselves entirely deficient in the power of seeing mental pictures — can become painters of the rank of Royal Acade¬ micians.” And James says of himself, “I am a good draughtsman and have a very lively interest in pictures, statues, architecture, and decoration, and a keen sensibility to artistic effects. But I am an extremely poor visualizer, and find myself often unable to reproduce in my mind’s eye pictures which I have most carefully examined.” * In these cases, a quickness to recognize and to discriminate colors and forms is combined with the inability to imagine them. Evidently, visual imagination is here replaced by pressure imagination — imagination of the motions necessary to the production of sculpture, machine, or figure: a sculptor of this type reproduces in imagination the movements of his chisel, and the geometrician draws his figure or indicates by imaged movements the sweep of orbits and the intersection of lines. Kiilpe discovered, experimentally, the same lack of visual * The “Principles of Psychology,” Vol. II., p. 53.
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