EYE-MINDEDNESS AND EAR-MINDEBNESS. 599 



hardly picture anything at all : they remembered the scene as 

 they would a poem, but they saw nothing. Mr. Galton also finds 

 that form is pictured better than color; that a high degree of 

 visualizing power is apt to be hereditary ; that scientific men as a 

 class are poor visualizers, owing to their busying themselves 

 with abstractions and generalizations, in which such a faculty 

 would be inconvenient and thus fail to be cultivated ; and many 

 other interesting conclusions. When properly trained, and pre- 

 vented from checking the plastic growth of mind, this faculty 

 should be as useful an educational aid as the possession of a 

 strong memory ; like the latter, it is no mark of high intellectual 

 capacity, but can be made a means of attaining it. 



Some extreme and almost abnormal forms of this visualizing 

 power are interesting in this connection. Examples of its extreme 

 development are found in chess-players who play many games at 

 once while blindfolded ; in orators who " see " the pages of their 

 manuscript as they speak ; in mechanicians who picture every de- 

 tail of construction and action of a machine in process of inven- 

 tion ; in " lightning-calculators," who do their work on an imagi- 

 nary blackboard ; in artists painting a portrait or copying a 

 painting from memory; and in countless others. Perhaps the 

 crowning example is that of two chess-players, both gifted in this 

 .way, who could play a game of chess as they walked the streets ; 

 each announcing his move, and securely and readily picturing the 

 result on their imaginary chess-board. 



A strange development of this faculty (which, when it occurs, 

 occurs almost always in conjunction with a strong visualizing 

 power) is seen in certain imperative associations between colors or 

 forms and sounds. The most common example is what Mr. Gal- 

 ton terms a " number-form." Many persons, when hearing or 

 even thinking of a number or of a series of numbers, see these 

 numbers arranged in definite shapes in a definite part of space. 

 Some see them in the form of a circle ; some as a broken line, the 

 numbers 10, 12, 20, and 100 usually standing at the angles ; and 

 others have a variety of more complex and fantastic shapes. The 

 letters of the alphabet — especially the vowels — the names of the 

 months, of the days of the week, of persons and places, musical 

 sounds, and so on, are associated in this realistic way with forms 

 and colors. One gentleman has actually a whole alphabet of 

 sound-colors, and can paint the sounds of v-i-s-u-a-l-i-z-a-t-i-o-n in 

 colors, or read words out of wall-paper patterns.* 



That such powers easily shade into the morbid is not hard to 

 believe. Many of the chess-players who play blindfolded are 



* Further examples and much interesting information are to be found in Mr. Galton's 

 papers, loc. cit. (where are also illustrative diagrams and plates), and in " Zwangsempfin- 

 dungen durch Licht und Schall," by Bleuler and Lehmann, 1881, a small monograph. 



