Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 15.djvu/552

 ; it was described to me as having been "spectral" in its perfect definition. Yet no one better than Macaulay had the power of vivid generalization, that is, of creating a single clear image out of a multitude of allied facts. Many poets and painters have had the visualizing faculty in an extraordinary degree, while it is in the brains of poets and painters generally that we find the artistic power to reside of producing pictures that are not copies of any individual, but represent the characteristics of large classes. Painters and poets create blended portraits in profusion, and we, who are not gifted as they are, can nevertheless understand and appreciate their works. In other words, their blended images are well-defined representations of what we ourselves had already conceived in a dim and confused way.

There seems, then, to be no doubt, from whatever side we may approach the subject of memory—whether from its material or its mental aspect, and, in the latter case, whether the visualizing faculty be faint or vivid—that different special memories admit with facility of being blended into a common image. From blended memories to general impressions and ideas is a step on which we need not linger, the letter being derived from the former. They are faint traces of them, and they inherit all their errors.

I conclude, then, that the formation of blended images is an habitual operation of the mind, whence those general impressions have arisen by which the great majority of our daily actions are guided.

I will now proceed to speak of blended portraits, in order to illustrate the formation of blended memories and the effect of the resultant images; or let me henceforth describe them as generic portraits and generic mental images. The word generic presupposes a genus. The objects to be portrayed must all have many points of likeness in common, and it is of especial importance that characteristics of a medium quality should be much more common among them than those that deviate widely. No statistician dreams of grouping heterogeneous facts in the same table; no more do I propose to group heterogeneous forms in the same picture. Statistical averages, and the like, are nonsensical productions unless they apply to objects that cluster toward a common center; and composite pictures are equally monstrous or meaningless unless they are compounded of objects that have a common similarity to a central ideal type.

It might be thought that blended portraits would form mere smudges, and so they would if only a few specimens of extremely different casts of features were combined, but in all groups that may be called generic the common points of resemblance are so numerous, and medium characteristics are so much the more frequent, that they predominate in the result. All that is common to the group remains; all that is individual disappears.

Generic portraits are made by a method which I described for the