"There are great differences in the power of forming pictures of objects in the mind's eye; in other words of visualising them. In some persons the faculty of perceiving these images is so feeble that they hardly visualise at all. […] Other persons perceive past scenes with a distinctness and an appearance of reality that differ little from actual vision. Between these wide extremes I have met with a mass of intermediate cases extending in an unbroken series. " (Francis Galton, "Mental imagery", 1880)
"There is a kind, I might almost say, of artistic satisfaction, when we are able to survey the enormous wealth of Nature as a regularly ordered whole - a kosmos, an image of the logical thought of our own mind." (Hermann von Helmholtz, "Popular Lectures on Scientific Subjects", 1881)
"[…] the image is not a symbol or idea. It is itself a fact, or else the facts eject it." (Francis H Bradley, "Principles of Logic", 1883)
"While all that we have is a relation of phenomena, a mental image, as such, in juxtaposition with or soldered to a sensation, we can not as yet have assertion or denial, a truth or a falsehood. We have mere reality, which is, but does not stand for anything, and which exists, but by no possibility could be true. […] the image is not a symbol or idea. It is itself a fact, or else the facts eject it. The real, as it appears to us in perception, connects the ideal suggestion with itself, or simply expels it from the world of reality. […] you possess explicit symbols all of which are universal and on the other side you have a mind which consists of mere individual impressions and images, grouped by the laws of a mechanical attraction." (Francis H Bradley, "Principles of Logic", 1883)
"The traditional psychology talks like one who should say a river consists of nothing but pailsful, spoonsful, quartpotsful, barrelsful, and other moulded forms of water. Even were the pails and the pots all actually standing in the stream, still between them the free water would continue to flow. It is just this free water of consciousness that psychologists resolutely overlook. Every definite image in the mind is steeped and dyed in the free water that flows round it. With it goes the sense of its relations, near and remote, the dying echo of whence it came to us, the dawning sense of whither it is to lead." (William James, "On Some Omissions of Introspective Psychology", Mind, 1884)
"Mental states of every kind - sensations, feelings, images - which were at one time present in consciousness and then have disappeared from it - have not with their disappearance absolutely ceased to exist. Although the inwardly - turned look may no longer be able to find them, nevertheless they have not been utterly destroyed and annulled, but in a certain manner they, continue to exist, stored up to speak, in the memory." (Hermann Ebbinghaus, "Memory: A contribution to experimental psychology", 1885)
"[…] deduction consists in constructing an icon or diagram the relations of whose parts shall present a complete analogy with those of the parts of the object of reasoning, of experimenting upon this image in the imagination, and of observing the result so as to discover unnoticed and hidden relations among the parts." (Charles S Peirce, 1885)
"The great basic thought that the world is not to be comprehended as a complex of ready-made things, but as a complex of processes, in which the things apparently stable no less than their mind-images in our heads, the concepts, go through an uninterrupted change of coming into being and passing away, in which, in spite of all seeming accidents and of all temporary retrogression, a progressive development asserts itself in the end - this great fundamental thought has, especially since the time of Hegel, so thoroughly permeated ordinary consciousness that in this generality it is scarcely ever contradicted." (Friedrich Engels, "Ludwig Feuerbach and the Outcome of Classical German Philosophy", 1886)
"Perspective is nothing more than a rational demonstration applied to the consideration of how objects in front of the eye transmit their image to it, by means of a pyramid of lines." (Leonardo da Vinci, "The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci", 1888)
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