“There are tories in science who regard imagination as a faculty to be avoided rather than employed. They observe its actions in weak vessels and are unduly impressed by its disasters” —John Tyndall, 1870
In his 1881 essay on Mental
Imagery, Francis Galton noted that few Fellows of the Royal Society or members
of the French Institute, when asked to do so, could imagine themselves sitting
at the breakfast-table from which presumably they had only recently arisen.
Members of the general public, women especially, fared much better, being able
to conjure up vivid images of themselves enjoying their morning meal. From this
Galton, an anthropologist, noted polymath, and eugenicist, concluded that
learned men, bookish men, relying as they do on abstract thought, depend on
mental images little, if at all.
In this rejection of the
scientific role for the imagination Galton was in disagreement with Irish
physicist John Tyndall who in a 1870 address to the British Association in
Liverpool entitled The Scientific Use of the Imagination claimed that in
explaining sensible phenomena, scientists habitually form mental images of that
which is beyond the immediately sensible. "Newton’s passage from a falling
apple to a falling moon”, Tyndall wrote, “was, at the outset, a leap of the
prepared imagination.” The imagination, Tyndall claimed, is both the source of
poetic genius and an instrument of discovery in science.
The role of the imagination is
chemistry, is well enough known. In 1890 the German Chemical Society celebrated
the discovery by Friedrich August Kekulé von Stradonitz of the structure of
benzene, a ring-shaped aromatic hydrocarbon. At this meeting Kekulé related
that the structure of benzene came to him as a reverie of a snake seizing its
own tail (the ancient symbol called the Ouroboros).
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