JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 398

The imagines of this “empty man” (25th in a series on Blank and Empty Things in this blog)
is taken from one of the physio-electrical works of Auguste Forel
(1842-1931), a eugenicist, sexologist, socialist, myrmecologist,
neuroanatomist, shrink, social moralizer and member (at the very end)
of the Bahai’i faith…and also a man very much taken with himself.  I
don’t much like him.  (Outside of his racist views and semi-bizarre
socialist theories, he managed to politically opiate a four-volume work
on ants with vague wrappings of political theory and ant behavior. 
Freud liked him. Case closed.)

I’m not so sure about what exactly these diagrams were supposed to
illustrate in the real-life of Forel’s scientific experience, and I
don’t care that much.  What I do like is the imaginative taste it
implies, this blank-expressioned person waiting for the electricity to
do its work, giving him/her an idea, helping whatever currents exist
along the hemisphere of the brain to deliver its electrical-best. 
All-in-all, if explanation was removed, the images would perfectly
depict a person devoid of thought; or, a person whose thought was being
directed.  Plus a myriad of other things; base of it all though is that
there is a fair amount of blank/empty experience going on here.