556 PSYCHOLOGY. 



dark and grope among the objects there. The t(nich of the 

 matches will instantaneously recall their appearance. If 

 his hand comes in contact with an orange on the table, the 

 golden yellow of the fruit, its savor and perfume will forth- 

 with shoot through his mind. In passing the hand over 

 the sideboard or in jogging the coal-scuttle with the foot, 

 the large glossy dark shape of the one and the irregular 

 blackness of the other awaken like a flash and constitute 

 what we call the recognition of the objects. The voice of 

 the violin faintly echoes through the mind as the hand is 

 laid u2)on it in the dark, and the feeling of the garments or 

 draperies which may hang about the room is not understood 

 till the look correlative to the feeling has in each case been 

 resuscitated. Smells notoriously have the power of recall- 

 ing the other experiences in whose company they were wont 

 to be felt, perhaps long years ago ; and the voluminous 

 emotional character assumed by the images which sud- 

 denly pour into the mind at such a time forms one of the 

 staple topics of popular psychologic wonder — 



" Lost and gone and lost and gone ! 

 A breath, a whisper — some divine farewell — 

 Desolate sweetness — far and far away." 



We cannot hear the din of a railroad train or the yell 

 of its whistle, without thinking of its long, jointed appear- 

 ance and its headlong speed, nor catch a familiar voice in 

 a crowd without recalling, with the name of the sj)eaker, 

 also his face. But the most notorious and important case 

 of the mental combination of auditory with optical impres- 

 sions originally experienced together is furnished by lan- 

 guage. The child is ofl'ered a new and delicious fruit and 

 is at the same time told that it is called a ' fig.' Or looking 

 out of the window he exclaims, " What a funny horse ! " and 

 is told that it is a ' piebald ' horse. When learning his let- 

 ters, the sound of each is repeated to him whilst its shape 

 is before his eye. Thenceforward, long as he may live, he 

 will never see a fig, a piebald horse, or a letter of the alpha- 

 bet without the name which he first heard in conjunction 

 with each clinging to it in his mind ; and inversely he will 



