On Images (1890-1899)

"Every definite image in the mind is steeped and dyed in the free water that flows around 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. The significance, the value, of the image is all in this halo or penumbra that surrounds and escorts it, - or rather that is fused into one with it and has become bone of its bone and flesh of its flesh; leaving it, it is true, an image of the same thing it was before, but making it an image of that thing newly taken and freshly understood." (William James, "The Principles of Psychology", 1890)

"[...] the task of the theory consists in constructing a picture of the external world that exists purely internally and must be our guiding star in all thought and experiment; that is in completing, as it were, the thinking process and carrying out globally what on a small scale occurs within us whenever we form an idea." (Ludwig E Boltzmann, "On the Significance of Theories", 1890) 

"Great thinkers have vast premonitory glimpses of schemes of relations between terms, which hardly even as verbal images enter the mind, so rapid is the whole process. We all of us have this permanent consciousness of whither our thought is going." (William James, "The Principles of Psychology", 1890)

"[...] thought is the representative or cognitive apprehension of relations among notions; imagination is the affective or felt apprehension of relations among images." (James M Baldwin, Handbook of Psychology: Senses and Intellect", 1890)

"Ask your imagination if it will accept a vibrating multiple proportion - a numerical ratio in a state of oscillation? I do not think it will. You cannot crown the edifice with this abstraction. The scientific imagination, which is here authoritative, demands, as the origin and cause of a series of ether-waves, a particle of vibrating matter quite as definite, though it may be excessively minute, as that which gives origin to a musical sound. Such a particle we name an atom or a molecule. I think the intellect, when focused so as to give definition without penumbral haze, is sure to realize this image at the last." (John Tyndall, "Fragments of Science", 1892)

"The mechanism of thought consists in combinations, separations, and recombinations of representative images or symbols […] the object of thought is adaptation to environment." (Paul Carus,"Le probeme de la conscience du moi", 1893)

"For our purpose it is not necessary that they [images] should be in conformity with the things in any other respect whatever. As a matter of fact, we do not know, nor have we any means of knowing, whether our conceptions of things are in conformity with them in any other than this one fundamental respect."  (Heinrich Hertz, "The Principles of Mechanics Presented in a New Form", 1894)

"In this sense the fundamental ideas of mechanics, together with the principles connecting them, represent the simplest image which physics can produce of things in the sensible world and the processes which occur in it. By varying the choice of the propositions which we take as fundamental, we can give various representations of the principles of mechanics. Hence we can thus obtain various images of things; and these images we can test and compare with each other in respect of permissibility, correctness, and appropriateness." (Heinrich Hertz, "The Principles of Mechanics Presented in a New Form", 1894)

"It is now known that as the physical basis of any word, be it noun or verb, there is a series of mental images acquired through different senses, located in different regions of the gray cortex of the brain, and joined together in a unit by a series of association-tracts which pass in the white matter under the cortex. The word ‘concept’ long used by psychologists to denote congeries of mental images making up an idea conveyed by a single word may be adopted by the pathologist to indicate this collection of mental images. To be complete, such a concept must have all its parts intact and the connections between those parts also intact. " (Anon, "Aphasia", Psychological Review Vol. I (1), 1894)

"Mature knowledge regards logical clearness as of prime importance: only logically clear images does it test as to correctness; only correct images does it compare as to appropriateness. By pressure of circumstances the process is often reversed. Images are found to be suitable for a certain purpose; are next tested as to their correctness ; and only in the last place purged of implied contradictions." (Heinrich Hertz, "The Principles of Mechanics Presented in a New Form", 1894)

"The most direct, and in a sense the most important, problem which our conscious knowledge of nature should enable us to solve is the anticipation of future events, so that we may arrange our present affairs in accordance with such anticipation. As a basis for the solution of this problem we always make use of our knowledge of events which have already occurred, obtained by chance observation or by prearranged experiment. In endeavouring thus to draw inferences as to the future from the past, we always adopt the following process. We form for ourselves images or symbols of external objects; and the form which we give them is such that the necessary consequents of the images in thought are always the images of the necessary consequents in nature of the things pictured. In order that this requirement may be satisfied, there must be a certain conformity between nature and our thought." (Heinrich Hertz, "The Principles of Mechanics Presented in a New Form", 1894)

"That phenomenon which corresponds to a thing in thought, we will call the representation, concept or mental image of a thing." (Giuseppe Veronese, "Grundzüge der Geometrie von mehreren Dimensionen und mehreren Arten gradliniger Einheiten in elementarer Form entwickelt", 1894)

"The images which we may form of things are not determined without ambiguity by the requirement that the consequents of the images must be the images of the consequents. Various images of the same objects are possible, and these images may differ in various respects. We should at once denote as inadmissible all images which implicitly contradict the laws of our thought. Hence we postulate in the first place that all our images shall be logically permissible or, briefly, that they shall be permissible. We shall denote as incorrect any permissible images, if their essential relations contradict the relations of external things, i.e. if they do not satisfy our first fundamental requirement. Hence we postulate in the second place that our images shall be correct. But two permissible and correct images of the same external objects may yet differ in respect of appropriateness. Of two images of the same object that is the more appropriate which pictures more of the essential relations of the object, the one which we may call the more distinct. Of two images of equal distinctness the more appropriate is the one which contains, in addition to the essential characteristics, the smaller number of superfluous or empty relations, the simpler of the two. Empty relations cannot be altogether avoided: they enter into the images because they are simply images, images produced by our mind and necessarily affected by the characteristics of its mode of portrayal." (Heinrich Hertz, "The Principles of Mechanics Presented in a New Form", 1894)

"[…] we cannot a priori demand from nature simplicity, nor can we judge what in her opinion is simple. But with regard to images of our own creation we can lay down requirements. We are justified in deciding that if our images are well adapted to the things, the actual relations of the things must be represented by simple relations between the images. And if the actual relations between the things can only be represented by complicated relations, which are not even intelligible to an unprepared mind, we decide that those images are not sufficiently well adapted to the things. Hence our requirement of simplicity does not apply to nature, but to the images thereof which we fashion ; and our repugnance to a complicated statement as a fundamental law only expresses the conviction that, if the contents of the statement are correct and comprehensive, it can be stated in a simpler form by a more suitable choice of the fundamental conceptions." (Heinrich Hertz, "The Principles of Mechanics Presented in a New Form", 1894)

"We form ourselves images or symbols of external objects; and the form which we give them is such that the necessary consequents of the images in thought are always the images of the necessary consequents in nature of the things pictured." (Heinrich Hertz, "Die Prinzipien der Mechanik in neuem Zusammenhange dargestellt", 1894)

"It is a mistake to reduce mater to the perception which we have of it, a mistake also to make of it a thing able to produce in us perceptions, but in itself is of another nature than they. Matter, in our view, is an aggregate of ‘images’. And by ‘image‘ we mean a certain existence which is more than that which the idealist calls a representation, but less than that which the realist calls a thing - an existence placed halfway between the ‘thing‘ and the ‘representation’. This conception of matter is simply that of common sense. [...] For common sense, then, the object exists in itself, and, on the other hand, the object is, in itself, pictorial, as we perceive it image it is, but a self-existing image." (Henri Bergson,"Matter and Memory", 1896)

"Memory-images, it is true, cannot be directly aroused through external sense impressions, but follow them after a longer or shorter interval. Still, it is obvious that their attributes, and especially their relation to the primary ideas through direct impressions, can be most accurately be learned, not by waiting for their chance arrival, but by using such memory-ideas as may be aroused in a systematic, experimental way, through immediately preceding impressions." (Wilhelm M Wundt, "Outlines of Psychology", 1897)

"Intellectual work is an act of creation. It is as if the mental image that is studied over a period of time were to sprout appendages like an ameba - outgrowths that extend in all directions while avoiding one obstacle after another - before interdigitating with related ideas." (Santiago Ramón y Cajal, "Reglas y Consejos sobre Investigacíon Cientifica: Los tónicos de la voluntad", 1897)

"[…] we must have imagination. I do not mean mere fancy, which creates unreal images and impossible monsters, but imagination, the power of making pictures or images in our mind of that which is, though it is invisible to us." (Arabella B Buckley, "The Fairy-Land of Science", 1899)