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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    mind even a single letter of the alphabet in purely retinal terms. I must trace the letter,” he says, “by running my mental eye over its contour.” The various phenomena of aphasia, the cerebral disease affecting the word-consciousness, confirm these results of introspection. They show that verbal imagery is impaired by injury to the visual, to the auditory, or to any tactual- motor centre, or by injury to the neurones connecting these areas, and that corresponding with these different patho¬ logical conditions there may be independent loss of words as read, as heard, as spoken, or as written. Several general conclusions follow from the study of the sense-orders of our images: the impossibility, first of all, of supposing that any normal person is unimaginative. Since imagination is not of necessity an artistic impulse, a lofty soaring in empyrean isolation from the everyday life, but merely, as we have seen, the imaging of colors, sounds, pres¬ sures, odors, tastes, or even of words, it follows that every¬ body who is conscious of anything whatever, in its absence, is in so far imaginative. When I am conscious of the hat which I yesterday bought or of the dinner which I shall eat to-day, no less than when I muse upon the picture I shall paint or of the world I shall discover, I am, in a strict sense, imaginative. Our study, furthermore, makes it clear that almost everybody is capable of inciting himself to vivid and accurate imagination of one sort or another. If, try as he will, the colors are washed out and the outlines indistinct in his visual images of an opera or of a country outlook, he may hear, in imagination, the varying parts of strings and horns in the orchestral prelude, the melodies of the songs and the harmonies of the choruses, or the liquid bird-notes, lapping
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