But everybody is not so ready to admit that sane and
sensible men and women can have hallucinations, just because everybody
has not been hallucinated.
On this point Mr. Francis Galton, in his Inquiries into Human Faculty
(1833), is very instructive. Mr. Galton drew up a short catechism,
asking people how clearly or how dimly they saw things "in their
mind's eye".
"Think of your breakfast-table," he said; "is your mental picture of
it as clearly illuminated and as complete as your actual view of the
scene?" Mr. Galton began by questioning friends in the scientific
world, F.R.S.'s and other savants. "The earliest results of my
inquiry amazed me. . . . The great majority of the men of science to
whom I first applied, protested that _mental imagery was unknown to
them_, and they looked on me as fanciful and fantastic in supposing
that the words 'mental imagery' really expressed what I believed
everybody supposed them to mean." One gentleman wrote: "It is only
by a figure of speech that I can describe my recollection of a scene
as a 'mental image' which I can 'see' with 'my mind's eye'.
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