PHOTOGRAPHY.

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume XLVI, Issue XLVI, 21 October 1911, Page 3

PHOTOGRAPHY.

PHOTOGRAPHING A THOUGHT,

A communication has been made to the Fr--nch Academy of Sciences, which if. it is all that it claims to be, qpens up qmte a new field in .psychological science. It is the alleged discovery that certain- mental images, corresponding to material objects, can he photographed. As a proof, two photographs were presented, one representing a bottle and the othe r a cane. The discoverer, Major Darget, whoi has -nad-J .particular researches in this nelo., va-d who is credited with Slaving also I : scovered tbe rays emitted by the human body, which he calls V-rays, declares that the cane and the bottle were .photographed from his mind or. tram -white he was thinking of them. He describes the process as follows was in a dark 'room, and fcr a quarter of an hour he kept his mind fixed on a, bottle ynicb he'could see before him. He kept at the same time a photographic plate before him, plunged in a developing bath and held his fingers in the same bath. -Ait tn~ end of th-j quarter of an hour the image of a bottle aippeared on the photographic plate. He went through the same experience, he says, in the presence ot six witnesses, and then the .photograph of the mental image of the cane was taken in tho same way in the presence ot the witness. All this, of course, does not absolutely prove that he has actually photographed thought, or mental images in an abstract way. Of course, there is nothin e imipossible in the process. Images of external objects enter and fix themselves in on" brains through the retina of the ev". and if thev enter, they can also Vn-e'the bra'n and be reflected in some way—on a photographic plate. ■ tor .instance It is only coming back to the i old philosophic definition that an idea or nv-ntal concept is "similitudo oo.iecti m tt existed." : The whole V™c<**, however, would have to submitted to the usual «cientfic rules As the £5 has been stated before the Academy thYref is notbing to prove tiPt the socalled mental may not have-been reoroduced rimplv from the retina cf the eves, as th* major states that he kept hJ -ev«s fixed en the bottle and i*£ oaL Theseand other objections might oe made; but tbe experiment nevertheless up a very, interesting field for research.