University of Virginia Library

Topic 3. IMAGINATION.

Section 45.

The things witnesses tell us have formerly existed in their imaginations, and the how of this existence determines in a large degree the quale of what they offer us. Hence, the nature of imagination must be of interest to us, and the more so, as we need not concern ourselves with the relation between being and imagination. It may be that things may exist in forms quite different from those in which we know them, perhaps even in unknowable forms. The idealist, according to some authorities, has set this possibility aside and given a scientific reply to those who raised it.

So far as we lawyers are concerned, the "scientific reply" does not matter. We are interested in the reliability of the imagination and in its identification with what we assume to exist and to occur. Some writers hold that sensory objects are in sense-perception both external and internal, external with regard to each other, and internal with regard to consciousness. Attention is called to the fact that the distinction between image and object constitutes no part of the act of perception. But those who remark this fact assume that the act does contain an image. According to St. Augustine the image serves as the knowledge of the object; according to Erdmann the object is the image objectified.

Of great importance is the substitutional adequacy of images. E. g., I imagine my absent dog, Bismarck's dog, whom I know only pictorially, and finally, the dog of Alcibiades, whose appearance is known only by the fact that he was pretty and that his master had cut off his tail. In this case, the representative value of these images will be definite, for everybody knows that I can imagine my own dog very correctly, that the image of Bismarck's beast will also be comparatively good inasmuch as this animal has been frequently

pictured and described, while the image of Alcibiades' dog will want much in the way of reliability—although I have imagined this historic animal quite vividly since boyhood. When, therefore, I speak of any one of these three animals everybody will be able properly to value the correctness of my images because he knows their conditions. When we speak with a witness, however, we rarely know the conditions under which he has obtained his images, and we learn them only from him. Now it happens that the description offered by the witness adds another image, i. e., our own image of the matter, and this, and that of the witness, have to be placed in specific relation to each other. Out of the individual images of all concerned an image should be provided which implies the image of the represented event. Images can be compared only with images, or images are only pictures of images.[1]

The difficulty of this transmutation lies fundamentally in the nature of representation. Representation can never be identical with its object. Helmholtz has made this most clear: "Our visions and representations are effects; objects seen and represented have worked on our nervous system and on our consciousness. The nature of each effect depends necessarily upon the nature of its cause, and the nature of the individual upon whom the cause was at work. To demand an image which should absolutely reproduce its object and therefore be absolutely true, would be to demand an effect which should be absolutely independent of the nature of that object on which the effect is caused. And this is an obvious contradiction."

What the difference between image and object consists of, whether it is merely formal or material, how much it matters, has not yet been scientifically proved and may never be so. We have to assume only that the validity of this distinction is universally known, and that everybody possesses an innate corrective with which he assigns proper place to image and object, i. e., he knows approximately the distinction between them. The difficulty lies in the fact that not all people possess an identical standard, and that upon the creation of the latter practically all human qualities exert an influence. This variety in standards, again, is double-edged. On the one side it depends on the essence of image and of object, on the other it depends on the alteration which the image undergoes even during perception as well as during all the ensuing time. Everybody knows this distinction. Whoever has seen anything under certain circumstances, or during a certain period of his life, may frequently

produce an image of it varying in individual characteristics, but in its general character constant. If he sees it later under different conditions, at a different age, when memory and imaginative disposition have exercised their alterative influence, image and object fail to correspond in various directions. The matter is still worse with regard to images of things and events that have never been seen. I can imagine the siege of Troy, a dragon, the polar night and Alexander the Great, but how different will the image be from the object!

This is especially obvious when we have perceived something which did not appear to us altogether correct. We improve the thing, i. e., we study how it might have been better, and we remember it as improved; then the more frequently this object as imagined recurs, the more fixed its form becomes, but not its actual form, only its altered form. We see this with especial clearness in the case of drawings that in some way displease us. Suppose I do not like the red dress of a woman in some picture and I prefer brown. If later I recall the picture the image will become progressively browner and browner, and finally I see the picture as brown, and when I meet the real object I wonder about the red dress.[2]

We get this situation in miniature each time we hear of a crime, however barren the news may be,—no more than a telegraphic word. The event must naturally have some degree of importance, because, if I hear merely that a silver watch has been stolen, I do not try to imagine that situation. If, however, I hear that near a hostelry in X, a peasant was robbed by two traveling apprentices I immediately get an image which contains not only the unknown region, but also the event of the robbery, and even perhaps the faces of those concerned. It does not much matter that this image is completely false in practically every detail, because in the greater number of cases it is corrected. The real danger lies in the fact that this correction is frequently so bad and often fails altogether and that, in consequence, the first image again breaks through and remains the most vigorous.[3] The vigor is the greater because we always attach such imagination to something actual or approximately real, and inasmuch as the latter thing is either really seen, or at least energetically imagined, the first image acquires renewed power of coming up. According to Lipps, "Reproductive images

presuppose dispositions. Dispositions ensue upon perceptions that they imply; still there are reproductive images and imagined wholes which imply no preceding perceptions. This contradiction is solved when dispositions are contained in other things at the same time. A finite number of dispositions may in this way be also infinite.... Dispositions are transformed power itself, power transformed in such a way as to be able to respond actively to inner stimulations."

The process is similar in the reproduction of images during speech. The fact that this reproduction is not direct but depends on the sequence of images, leads to the garrulity of children, old men, and uneducated people, who try to present the whole complex of relations belonging to any given image. But such total recall drives the judge to despair, not only because he loses time, but because of the danger of having the attention turned from important to unimportant things. The same thing is perceived in judicial documents which often reveal the fact that the dictator permitted himself to be led astray by unskilful witnesses, or that he had himself been responsible for abstruse, indirect memories. The real thinker will almost always be chary of words, because he retains, from among the numberless images which are attached to his idea, only those most closely related to his immediate purpose. Hence good protocols are almost always comparatively short. It is even as instructive as amusing to examine certain protocols, with regard to what ought to be omitted, and then with regard to the direct representations, i. e., to everything that appertains to the real illumination of the question. It is astounding how little of the latter thing is indicated, and how often it enters blindly because what was important has been forgotten and lost.

Of course, we must grant that the essence of representation involves very great difficulties. By way of example consider so ordinary a case as the third dimension. We are convinced that according to its nature it is much more complex than it seems to be. We are compelled to believe that distance is not a matter of sensation and that it requires to be explained.[4]

Psychologists indicate that the representation of the third dimension would be tremendously difficult without the help of experience. But experience is something relative, we do not know how much experience any man possesses, or its nature. Hence, we never can know clearly to what degree a man's physical vision is correct if

we do not see other means of verification. Consider now what is required in the assumption of the idea of the fourth dimension. Since its introduction by Henry More, this idea should quite have altered our conception of space. But we do not know how many cling to it unconsciously, and we should make no mistake if we said that nobody has any knowledge of how his neighbor perceives space.[5]

Movement is another thing difficult to represent or imagine. You can determine for yourself immediately whether you can imagine even a slightly complicated movement. I can imagine one individual condition of a movement after another, sequentially, but I can not imagine the sequence. As Herbart says somewhere, a successive series of images is not a represented succession. But if we can not imagine this latter, what do we imagine is not what it ought to be. According to Stricker,[6] the representation of movement is a quale which can not be given in terms of any other sensory quality, and no movement can be remembered without the brain's awakening a muscle-movement. Experience verifies this theory. The awakening of the muscular sense is frequently obvious whenever movement is thought of, and we may then perceive how, in the explanation or description of a movement, the innervation which follows the image in question, occurs. This innervation is always true. It agrees at least with what the witness has himself perceived and now tries to renew in his story. When we have him explain, for example, how some man had been choked, we may see movements of his hands which, however slight and obscure, still definitely indicate that he is trying to remember what he has seen, and this irrelevantly of what he is saying. This makes it possible to observe the alterations of images in the individual in question, an alteration which always occurs when the images are related to movements.

It follows further from the fact that movements are difficult to represent that the witness ought not to be expected accurately to recall them. Stricker says that for a long time he could not image a snow-fall, and succeeded only in representing one single instant of it. Now what is not capable of representation, can not well be recalled, and so we discover that it merely causes trouble to ask the witness to describe point by point even a simple sequence. The witness has only successive images, and even if the particular images are correct,

he has nothing objective for the succession itself, nothing rooted in the sequence. He is helped, merely, by the logic of events and his memory—if these are scanty, the succession of images is scanty, and therefore the reproduction of the event is inadequate. Hence this scantiness is as little remarkable as the variety of description in various witnesses, a variety due to the fact that the sequentialization is subjective.

Drawing is a confirmation of the fact that we represent only a single instant of motion, for a picture can never give us a movement, but only a single state within that movement. At the same time we are content with what the picture renders, even when our image contains only this simple moment of movement. "What is seen or heard, is immediately, in all its definiteness, content of consciousness" (Schuppe)—but its movement is not.

The influence of time upon images is hardly indifferent. We have to distinguish the time necessary for the construction of an image, and the time during which an image lasts with uniform vividness. Maudsley believes the first question difficult to answer. He leans on Darwin, who points out that musicians play as quickly as they can apprehend the notes. The question will affect the lawyer in so far as it is necessary to determine whether, after some time, an image of an event may ensue from which it is possible to infer back to the individuality of the witness. No other example can be used here, because on the rocky problem of the occurrence of images are shattered even the regulative arts of most modern psychophysics.

The second problem is of greater significance. Whether any practical use of its solution can be made, I can not say, but it urges consideration. Exner has observed that the uniform vividness of an image lasts hardly a second. The image as a whole does not disappear in this time, but its content endures unchanged for so long at most. Then it fades in waves. The correctness of this description may be tested by anybody. But I should like to add that my observations of my own images indicate that in the course of a progressive repetition of the recall of an image its content is not equally capable of reproduction. I believe, further, that no essential leaps occur in this alteration of the content of an idea, but that the alteration moves in some definite direction. If, then, I recall the idea of some object successively, I will imagine it not at one time bigger, then smaller, then again bigger, etc.; on the contrary, the series of images will be such that each new image will be either progressively bigger or progressively smaller.

If this observation of mine is correct and the phenomenon is not purely personal, Exner's description becomes of great value in examination, which because of its length, requires the repeated recall of standardizing images, and this in its turn causes an alteration in the ideational content. We frequently observe that a witness persuades himself into the belief of some definite idea in the course of his examination, inasmuch as with regard to some matter he says more and more definite things at the end than at the beginning. This may possibly be contingent on the alteration of frequently recalled ideas. One could make use of the process which is involved in the reproduction of the idea, by implying it, and so not being compelled to return endlessly to something already explained.

How other people construct their ideas, we do not, as we have seen, know, and the difficulty of apprehending the ideas or images of other people, many authorities clearly indicate.[7]