114 galton.org
114
Inquiries into Human Faculty
words. The words had no connection with these except sometimes by
accident. The instances I give are few and ridiculous. When I think of the
word Beast, it has a face something like a gurgoyle. The word Green has
also a gurgoyle face, with the addition of big teeth. The word Blue blinks
and looks silly, and turns to the right. The word Attention has the eyes
greatly turned to the left. It is difficult to draw them properly because, like
Alice’s ‘Cheshire cat,’ which at times became a grin without a cat, these
faces have expression without features. The expression of course” [note
the naïve phrase “of course.”—F. G.] “depends greatly on those of the
letters, which have likewise their faces and figures. All the little a’s turn
their eyes to the left, this determines the eyes of Attention. Ant, however,
looks a little down. Of course these faces are endless as words are, and it
makes my head ache to retain them long enough to draw.”
Some of the figures are very quaint. Thus the interrogation “what?”
always excites the idea of a fat man cracking a long whip. They are not
the capricious creations of the fancy of the moment, but are the regular
concomitants of the words, and have been so as far back as the memory is
able to recall.
When in perfect darkness, if the field of view be carefully watched,
many persons will find a perpetual series of changes to be going on
automatically and wastefully in it. I have much evidence of this. I will
give my own experience the first, which is striking to me, because I am
very unimpressionable in these matters. I visualise with effort; 1 am
peculiarly inapt to see “after-images,” “phosphenes,” “lightdust,” and
other phenomena due to weak sight or sensitiveness; and, again, before I
thought of carefully trying, I should have emphatically declared that my
field of view in the dark was essentially of a uniform black, subject to an
occasional light-purple cloudiness and other small variations. Now,
however, after habituating myself to examine it with the same sort of
strain that one tries to decipher a signpost in the dark, I have found out
that this is by no means the case, but that a kaleidoscopic change of
patterns and forms is continually going on, but they are too fugitive and
elaborate for me to draw with any approach to truth. I am astonished at
their variety, and cannot guess in the remotest degree the cause of them.
They disappear out of sight and
