Psychological Investigations 275
image or form without any idea of a word. Galton and Max Muller appear to be discussing on wholly different planes. "I add," writes Galton, "nothing about the advantage to modern inquirers due to their possession of Darwinian facts and theories, because we do not rate them in the same way." It was only possible for a pre-Darwinian or at any rate an anti-Darwinian to deny that animals think as well as man. "Dogs, Sir, do a deal of pondering," was a conception which had not and could not reach Max Muller. Galton broke a lance for Darwin, but he might as well have tilted at a windmill as at the Oxford nominalist.
. The matter of this controversy remained long in Galton's mind, and seven years later he published a short paper in the Psychological Review entitled "Arithmetic by Smell'." The purpose of the paper is to show that mental processes mdy be conducted by the sole medium of imaginary smells, just as well as by visual or auditory images, in other words, to prove that thought does not depend on words. Galton first devised an apparatus by which a whiff of scented air could be sent out as often as required beneath the nostrils. A separate simple apparatus was used for each scent and he worked with the eyes shut. He was thus able to produce at will a r- whiff of peppermint, camphor, carbolic acid, ammonia, aniseed, etc. He taught himself to associate two whiffs of peppermint with one whiff of camphor, three of peppermint with one of carbolic acid, and so on. He next practised simple addition sums with the scents themselves, and afterwards solely with the imagination of them.
"There was not the slightest difficulty in banishing all visual and auditory images from the mind, leaving nothing in the consciousness but real or imaginary scents Subtraction succeeded as well as addition. I did not go so far as to associate separate scents with the
attitudes of mind severally appropriate to subtraction and addition, but determined by my ordinary mental processes which attitude to assume, before isolating myself in the world of scents."
Galton did not attempt multiplication by smell, because he had convinced himself that arithmetic by scents only, and by imaginary scents, was possible with considerable speed and accuracy. He did, however, try some experiments on taste, using salt, sugar, citric acid, quinine, etc., and found that arithmetic by taste was as feasible as arithmetic by smell. Thus Galton proposed to rout the nominalists2.
In Nature for Nov. 15, 1894 (Vol. LI, pp. 73-4) Galton gave an account of Alfred Binet's book Psychologie des Grands (Jalculateurs et Joueurs d'Echecs. He refers to Inaudi, a Piedmontese, who did his mental sums by the sounds of the numbers, and to Diamaildi, a Greek, who worked with
1 Vol. i, pp. 61-2. New York and London, 1894.
2 I fear Max Muller might have retorted that without the earlier association of numbers with names arithmetic by smell or taste would be impossible. Such an assertion is like that of the theologian who holds that the agnostic either fails to act morally, or only does so owing to a Christian training or the Christian environment. The one neglects the ages long evolution of morality for which Christianity is a thing of yesterday and the other would neglect the ages long evolution of mind prior to language.