But to bring out the main distinction, consider my case as to the other senses. At the mention of the luscious taste of a pear I at once get a highly individualized memory of the pear taste with no possible chance of confusing it with the taste of anything else. It may make me long for a pear. I can see a pear, the teeth biting into it, the juice gushing from the broken, tooth-marked flesh, and I think of the pleasure that taste brings. But I can not taste the pear. Not to even the faintest degree. I can almost feel its contact to my fingers, teeth, tongue, mouth, even the contact of the extracted juice—so much so that I'm tempted to say I have a little touch-imagination. But I can not taste that pear.
I am equally negative as to smells. I am so sensitive to contact that I almost shrink from the imagined grating of a rough surface over my clothes. But I can not really feel that grating. For touch, smell and taste I have only intellectual concepts. (Yet with me these actual senses themselves are all rather more than normally acute.) But I can undoubtedly see things through the eyes of my imagination. As to hearing, frankly I am unable to answer. I can not persuade myself I really hear sounds with my imagination, yet I can imagine to myself any tune I know, note for note. Probably I have an abortive sound-imagination that could be developed to an easily recognizable degree by practise and concentration.
You will get from the above at least a general idea of the necessary distinction—a far better idea than my bare questions could give to those who answered them. You will get, also, an idea of the difficulty in giving definite answers. Analyze your own imagination responses, refusing to be satisfied with snap judgments. Try out some of your friends. And bear this distinction in mind when reading and weighing the answers that follow. Incidentally, please extend to me a little sympathy over my task of trying to classify and tabulate the data from these answers and remember that any such tabulation must be more or less arbitrary. If you doubt it, try to tabulate them!
Another distinction that some answerers failed to make (and thereby added to the scope and value of our data) is that between sense impressions and emotions. Just as one can hear a real sound without emotion, so can one hear an imaginary sound without emotion, or feel emotion in either case. Nor, of course, is emotion dependent upon any sense impression, since a thought, idea or bare concept can bring it into being. The data on emotion is of decided interest, but is to be considered quite apart from sense impressions through the imagination, though an investigation as to the effect of one upon the other might prove worth while.
The fourth question concerns the actual effect on the reader of the kind of sense stimuli the author puts into his writing, or of the absence of stimuli. Here a distinction must be very carefully drawn in considering the answers. The real point is not whether an author in general or a story as a whole interests or fails to interest, but whether, all other factors aside, the descriptions (of places, things, people, etc.,)—the stimuli to sensory imagination—interest and why.
The fifth question on the imagination (as to stock pictures instead of individualized ones) is of comparatively little importance, except as it shows that some readers will resort to stock pictures if the author fails to paint individualized pictures that interest them.
The sixth question proves of minor importance and the seventh will be taken up after the answers.
As many of the answers would lose in value if their continuity were broken, there has been no attempt to separate them into the seven divisions. Each of the seven, however, has been separately tabulated, though any tabulation of them must to some degree be arbitrary.
Answers
Bill Adams: Yes—imagination's the whole thing. I hear the sounds, feel the roughness (ice on the ropes). I shudder when it's cold and sweat when it's hot; if the story runs as it should.