THE RIVALRY OF THE HIGHER SENSES. 763 



prevailing eye-mindedness of our times, together with some of its 

 causes. A moment's observation of our own stream of thought 

 will show us how largely it is made up of visual images. Any 

 one may easily verify for himself what the experience of deaf- 

 mutes has proved, that thought is both possible and common 

 without language, though this has so often been denied. It is 

 quite true that ear-minded people, with small visualizing power, 

 carry on much of their thinking by the symbolic imagery of 

 words. Most people doubtless do their more abstract thinking 

 largely through these convenient media, though Galton suggests 

 that abstract ideas are, after all, only generic images, composite 

 photographs, as it were, of the various individual things of our 

 experience. At any rate, if we examine our own minds we see 

 that what goes on there is, for the most part, a ceaseless flow of 

 images of concrete things, and that of these images the visual 

 ones are in a vast preponderance over those of the other senses. 

 Even the word image suggests a visual form, and imagination 

 should mean derivatively the reproduction of such forms. In our 

 abnormal mental states such as dreams or the delirium arising 

 from fever or drugs our experiences are visions rather than 

 sounds. In our dreams we see much and hear comparatively 

 little, while it is still rarer to dream of tastes and odors. The 

 congenitally blind are, of course, exceptions to this rule, while 

 blind deaf-mutes, like Laura Bridgman, dream in terms of what 

 senses they have, and there are other exceptions. There are 

 " voices " occasionally as well as " visions," and ear-minded people 

 dream less, no doubt, in visual terms. But the dreamer is the 

 " seer," as our very language shows. 



Now, there is, in the nature of mental life, no reason why our 

 images should be drawn so largely from the sense of sight. It is 

 an accidental circumstance, due to the fact that we use the eye 

 more than any of the other organs. The difference is both quanti- 

 tative and qualitative. Our ears, to be sure, are never closed, but 

 if we note the character of our auditory perceptions, we see that 

 little attention or intelligence is needed in this direction. The 

 significance of what we hear bears no comparison with the sig- 

 nificance of what we see. In every-day life the principal office of 

 the ear is the apprehension of spoken language. The limited and 

 ever-repeated vocabularies of our verbal symbols call for little 

 discriminative use. Thus far the ear is a drudge, carrying lifeless 

 symbols to be interpreted. Even the spoken word is by many 

 persons mentally turned immediately into the visual image, either 

 of the thing represented or the printed or written word. On the 

 other hand, some people, in reading, mentally represent the spoken 

 word, but it is the motor representation of the spoken word, not 

 a sensory image of its sound. The intelligent hearing of music 



