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.

    41/446 page 23
    “I cannot see what flowers are at my feet, Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs, But, in embalmed darkness, guess each sweet Wherewith the seasonable month endows The grass, the ’thicket, and the fruit tree wild; And mid-May’s eldest child, The coming musk-rose, full of dewy wine.” Besides this unintended evidence from imaginative writers we have well-attested instances of the smell and taste imagina¬ tion, both in waking experience and in dreams, of well-trained observers. An inquiry among fifty Wellesley College stu¬ dents, somewhat trained in introspection, disclosed the fact that thirty-one were sure that they could imagine the odors of certain substances, such as burning tar, burning sulphur, and mignonette. More common than any of these classes of concrete imagi¬ nation is that to which we have already referred as the ‘mixed type.’ The imagination of any object is likely, in other words, to include elements of more than one sense- order : it is not wholly visual and still less is it entirely audi¬ tory or tactual. Either the visual or auditory elements may predominate, but the imagination — of a dinner-party, for example — is rarely a mere complex of the colors and forms of dresses, faces, candles, flowers, foods, nor yet of the sounds of conversation, laughter, and service, but it includes both visual and auditory images, perhaps with a pressure image also of the ‘feel’ of linen or of silver, and a gustatory or olfactory image of the taste of beef or the odor of roses. Contrasted with all these classes of concrete imagination are the verbal types, which are far more prevalent than any
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