STRANGE PERSONIFICATIONS. '- 113 



M. F always outside of him, but very near hardly a yard 



away ; he is and always has been of the same size as he, from 

 which he concludes that they have grown up together. The man 

 of Wednesday and Friday, on the other hand, is always seen at a 

 considerable distance more than fifty yards. 



M. F does not personify any figure or number, except 14, 



which represents itself to him as an accountant sitting at his 

 desk, writing. Of the months and seasons, only autumn is per- 

 sonified, as the same sad-looking man with his finger on his eye 

 who represents Monday and Tuesday. 



Most of the common nouns are associated with personifica- 

 tions, or rather were ; for the phenomena were formerly much 



more numerous and persistent than now. M. F does not 



recollect having ever had such visions for isolated syllables, arti- 

 cles, pronouns, and other words without special significance ; yet, 

 at an age when he knew nothing of the gender of words or of sex, 

 the letters of the alphabet called up some (A, B, C, D, etc.) the 

 image of a pair of trousers, and others (as H, M, N, R, etc.) of a 

 robe. Words of a positive significance invoked representations 

 largely independent of their real sense. Bottle, for instance, in- 

 voked and still invokes the image of a large woman, laughing, 

 sitting on a little backed bench, with a table in front of her, but 

 no other suggestion of a bottle in the vision. Shark {requin) is 

 personified in a large horse stationed near the subject and by the 

 side of a load of hay. 



These parasitical representations, grafted on the word and 

 always accompanying it, were often considerable impediments 

 to conversation and reading. Now, with a few exceptions such 

 as the days of the week, the figures of which are still very intense 

 the images do not rise in the course of conversation or of an 

 interesting reading, but they appear readily enough on reflection 

 or when the book is a dull one. The relations of the personifica- 

 ti^n and of the real idea are reversed in this way: Formerly the 

 induced representation preceded the thought of the proper mean- 

 ing ; now it comes after it or remains latent, except in a few 

 instances as, for example, shark, where the image of the load of 



hay and the horse appears before the idea of the fish. M. F 



believes that his personifications reached their greatest intensity 

 in his childhood, when he was seven or eight years old, and that 

 they have progressively diminished since he was twelve. He 

 formerly thought that as a rule everybody had similar impres- 

 sions, but he was met with surprise and ridicule when he spoke 

 of them to others. 



M. F can say nothing of the cause of these curious phe- 

 nomena ; he finds them as far back as his recollection can reach, 

 almost unvarying in intensity and inexplicable. A very small 



VOL. LI. 



