Page:American Journal of Psychology Volume 21.djvu/529

Rh visual, 17 reported imagery of other kinds, 30 reported only peripheral sensations, 27 reported an absence from the field of attention of all sensory or ideational imagery, (p. 361.)

Woodworth states that in many of the instances in which imagery was reported, there was what he and Bühler call an "inadequacy" of imagery. This was particularly true of kinæsthetic images which, when present, were found to be unlike the movement that followed. "Sometimes the kinæsthetic represented movement was much briefer than the real movement. Sometimes the kinæsthetic image pictures a slow movement when the resulting movement is rapid. In general this sort of image frequently contrasts with the resulting sensations of actual movement. If we picture how a movement is going to feel and then make the movement we find it feels very different from what we anticipated." (pp. 362-363.)

This illustrates what these authors mean by the "inadequacy" of images. Bühler goes so far as to argue that the "Inadäquatheit zwischen dem Gedankengehalt und dem, was vorgestellt wird" (Kongress für experimentelle Psychologie, Bericht II, 1906, p. 264) is an indirect evidence that thought processes are carried on without imagery. Doubtless he would hold too, with Woodworth, that voluntary action may take place at the instigation of a "naked," imageless, thought.

This concept of the adequacy or inadequacy of mental imagery appears to be borrowed from the physical sciences and transferred bodily to the field of psychology. The argument seems to run thus: If a kinæsthetic image is the cause of a voluntary movement, then as such it must contain as much as is contained in the result, just as in physics the cause must, in terms of energy, be equivalent to the effect. Against this position the following arguments may be urged:

(1) The concept of "Adequacy" in the sense that, to be the cause of a movement, the mental image must contain as much as will be contained in the movement, reduces itself, when logically carried out, to a reductio ad absurdum. Bühler applies this concept to the thinking process, as has been shown, and concludes that images are not necessary to complex thinking processes because the image is frequently "inadequate." But why stop with movement and thinking? Why should not the same argument be applied to all mental processes and finding that everywhere images are "inadequate," as they certainly are, in the sense in which these authors seem to use the term, conclude that images are not essential to any of our mental processes, and thus rule the image out entirely and regard it as a really useless thing in all forms of experience?