122 Journal of Comparative Neurology. 



the childish organism makes it especially subject to transitory 

 but vivid excitement. The child will usually say nothing about 

 these visions for fear of ridicule, as adults seem prone to turn 

 the inner life of a child to sport and thus not rarely destroy the 

 germs of the most priceless of faculties. Even if the child re- 

 ports the hallucination it is regarded as simply an unusually vivid 

 dream. 



The difficulties in securing reliable evidence here are great 

 indeed, but so they are with adults. Take the familiar attempt 

 to discriminate between those who are and those who are not good 

 visualizers: the answers come promptly enough, "I see the objects 

 of recollection just as if they were before me, only the outlines are 

 dim as if the objects were imperfectly lighted." Now we may 

 be pretty confident that they do nothing of the sort. A few 

 questions will convince us that the subject is incapable of dis- 

 criminating between a mind picture and a visual projection. 

 That such a power exists in exceptional cases is undeniable, but 

 that it exists so commonly as recent tabulations seem to show 

 we hold to be a patent fallacy. The writer has a very good 

 visual memory and is very dependent upon it, in fact most of 

 the mental processes are based on visual accompaniments, yet 

 he was surprised to find, some time since, that the power of 

 voluntary visual projection does not exist to any appreciable 

 extent. When I recall a familiar object the first seeming is as 

 if I had actually seen the objet through a haze, but more care- 

 ful analysis shows that the mental picture is something entirely 

 different from the visual picture. It will be found that these 

 mind pictures are bundles of attributes, or rather the elemen- 

 tary states of feeling which habitually accompany the sight of 

 the object in question. 



In ordinary experience all of the commonly associated 

 feelings appear in the reproduction giving to the product a spur- 

 ious identity with the primary percept. Of course if absolutely 

 all were so reproduced the absence of the actual visual image 

 could not be detected, but the partial or imperfect return of 

 these feelings gives to the product its hazy character. In 

 dreams, on the other hand, the feelings reproduced are in ab- 



