STRANGE PERSONIFICATIONS. 115 



fications. This shows how unknown and mysterious are those 

 associations with which the creative activity of the imagination 

 is fed, which a single word suffices to bring into play, and of which 

 a notorious consequence is the well-known importance attached 

 by novelists to the choice of names for their heroes. 



The rapidity of the evocation of the images and their tenacity 

 when they are once formed appear especially marked in the ideas 



M. F conceives of the characters in a book. From the first 



two or three lines relative to a character he sees him rise in his 

 mental vision, often very different from the description given by 

 the author. A person described as blond, for example, appears 

 brown to him. The representation, however, persists firmly, and 

 the reading of the story does not modify it. No matter if the 

 little girl of the first pages does grow and change her character 

 in the course of the volume she always continues to him the 

 little girl of the beginning. When he reads the book a second 

 time, after the lapse of a few months, the identical personifica- 

 tions appear again unchanged. It is not so with the pictures of 

 places, likewise arbitrary and inexplicable, which M. F asso- 

 ciates spontaneously with every scene he reads about, and also, in 

 a smaller degree, with stories told him. These pictures, which 

 are usually recollections of childhood without connection with 

 the subject of the reading a description of a mountain, for in- 

 stance, suggests the recollection of a plain have some degree of 

 permanence in that they do not vary from one day to another 

 during the time he is occupied with the book ; but when he takes 

 up the volume again some time afterward he finds that they have 

 changed. He remembers very well on every occasion the image 

 of the place which he had before, and finds that the story now 

 calls out another. This variability of local images, in opposition 

 to the fixedness of personations proper, points to their greater 

 immediate dependence upon the subjective dispositions of the 

 movement.* 



These details seem to me, if not to exptain the inexhaustible 

 phantasmagoria of M. F 's personifications, at least to illus- 

 trate the special kind of imagination under the dominance of 

 which they spring forth. This imagination is characterized by 

 the union of two properties akin to those of sealing wax : great 

 docility in receiving an impression at the right moment, and 

 that moment once past an equal rigidity which opposes itself to 

 any further modification of the impression. Novelty, emotional 

 excitement, or a happy concourse of circumstances, accomplishes 



* For analogous examples of curious evocatioms, but apparently inconstant, induced by 

 reading or thought, see M. Pile's Contribute allo studio dei fenomeni sinestesici. Belluno, 

 1894, pp. 7, 8. 



