Herrick, Notes on Child Experiences. 123 



normal groups and at once betray their non-visual character 

 when judgement is allowed to act. 



The hallucinations of childhood are quite distinctly visual 

 and are located in or beyond the eyeballs. They are involun- 

 tary, though they may be caused to tarry a moment by close 

 attention or may be dissipated by a sudden motion. During 

 much of the writer's boyhood these hallucinations were a very 

 frequent occurrence immediatly after retiring, and, even at a 

 later time, they served to mitigate the slow torment of insomnia. 

 In this case the pictures were quite generally landscapes in their 

 natural colors and so vivid and charming as to give great 

 pleasure. 



These views rarely or never contained recognizable ele- 

 ments from actual experience nor could there be traced any as- 

 sociation with real or imaginary places. Sometimes the images 

 were of faces and the expression varied with kaleidoscopic fre- 

 quency. Indeed there are many analogies with the transforma- 

 tions which are occasioned in one's cloud pictures by the 

 changes in the forms of the clouds. The two phenomena have 

 this in common also that there is in each case an objective occa- 

 sion — a genuine sense irritation. In the case of the dream 

 hallucinations this irritation seems to be furnished by the con- 

 gested blood-currents in the retina or within the eye ball. The 

 common belief that a pathological condition is necessary to the 

 production of a great work of genius has this much of truth 

 in it, that the minute subjective stimuli due to irritation of 

 whatever kind, tend to form nuclei about which the fancy builds 

 as it does with the cloud materials, though in either case there 

 is the constructive imagination to be admitted as the prime 

 factor in a work of art. 



