[57] See also McCosh and Osborne, Princeton Review, Jan. 1884. There are some good examples of high development of the Faculty in the London Spectator, Dec. 28, 1878, pp. 1631, 1634, Jan. 4, 11, 25, and March 18, 1879.
[58] Take the following report from one of my students: "I am unable to form in my mind's eye any visual likeness of the table whatever. After many trials, I can only get a hazy surface, with nothing on it or about it. I can see no variety in color, and no positive limitations in extent, while I cannot see what I see well enough to determine its position in respect to my eye, or to endow it with any quality of size. I am in the same position as to the word dog. I cannot see it in my mind's eye at all; and so cannot tell whether I should have to run my eye along it, if I did see it."
[59] Progrès Médical, 21 juillet. I abridge from the German report of the case in Wilbrand: Die Seelenblindheit (188).
[60] In a letter to Charcot this interesting patient adds that his character also is changed: "I was formerly receptive, easily made enthusiastic, and possessed a rich fancy. Now I am quiet and cold, and fancy never carries my thoughts away.... I am much less susceptible than formerly to anger or sorrow. I lately lost my dearly-beloved mother; but felt far less grief at the bereavement than if I had been able to see in my mind's eye her physiognomy and the phases of her suffering, and especially less than if I had been able to witness in imagination the outward effects of her untimely loss upon the members of the family."
[61] Psychologie du Raisonnement (1886), p. 25.
[62] [I am myself a very poor visualizer, and find that I can seldom call to mind even a single letter of the alphabet in purely retinal terms. I must trace the letter by running my mental eye over its contour in order that the image of it shall have any distinctness at all. On questioning a large number of other people, mostly students, I find that perhaps half of them say they have no such difficulty in seeing letters mentally. Many affirm that they can see an entire word at once, especially a short one like 'dog,' with no such feeling of creating the letters successively by tracing them with the eye.—W. J.]
[63] It is hardly needful to say that in modern primary education, in which the blackboard is so much used, the children are taught their letters, etc., by all possible channels at once, sight, hearing, and movement.
[64] See an interesting case of a similar sort, reported by Farges, in l'Encéphale, 7me Année, p. 545.
[65] Philosophical Transactions, 1841, p. 65.
[66] Studien über die Sprachvorstellungen (1880), and Studien über die Bewegungsvorstellungen (1882).