ural. My
image, therefore, is regarded as an event in me, not as having that
position in the orderly happenings of the public world that belongs to
sensations. By saying that it is an event in me, we leave it possible
that it may be PHYSIOLOGICALLY caused: its privacy may be only due to
its connection with my body. But in any case it is not a public event,
like an actual person walking in at the door and sitting down in
my chair. And it cannot, like inner speech, be regarded as a SMALL
sensation, since it occupies just as large an area in my visual field as
the actual sensation would do.

Professor Watson says: "I should throw out imagery altogether
and attempt to show that all natural thought goes on in terms of
sensori-motor processes in the larynx." This view seems to me flatly to
contradict experience. If you try to persuade any uneducated person that
she cannot call up a visual picture of a friend sitting in a chair, but
can only use words describing what such an occurrence would be like,
she will conclude that you are mad. (This statement is based upon
experiment.) Galton, as every one knows, investigated visual imagery,
and found that education tends to kill it: the Fellows of the Royal
Society turned out to have much less of it than their wives. I see no
reason to doubt his conclusion that the habit of abstract pursuits makes
learned men much inferior to the average in power of visualizing, and
much more exclusively occupied with words in their "thinking." And
Professor Watson is a very learned man.

I shall henceforth assume that the existence of images is admitted, and
that they are to be distinguished from sensations by their causes,
as well as, in a lesser degree, by their effects. In their intrinsic
nature, though they often differ from sensations by being more dim
or vague or faint, yet they do not always or universally differ from
sensations in any way that can be used for defining them. Their privacy
need form no bar to the scientific study of them, any more than the
privacy of bodily sensations does. Bodily sensations are admitted by
even the most severe critics of introspection, although, like images,
they can only be observed by one observer. It must be admitted, however,
that the laws of the appearance and disappearance of images are little
known and difficult to discover, because we are not assisted, as in the
case of sensations, by our knowledge of the physical world.

There remains one very imp