58 PSYCHOLOor. 



place undoubtedly by means of verbal images, as was ex- 

 plained already in Chapter IX, pp. 265-6. 



The study qf Aphasia (see p. 54) has of late years shoion 

 hoiv unexpectedly great are the differences hetioeen individuals in 

 respect of imagination. And at the same time the discrepan- 

 cies between lesion and symptom in different cases of 

 the disease have been largely cleared up. In some indi- 

 viduals the habitual ' thought-stuff,' if one may so call it, 

 is visual ; in others it is auditory, articulatory, or motor ; 

 in most, perhaps, it is evenly mixed. The same local cerebral 

 injury must needs work different practical results in per- 

 sons who differ in this way. In one it will throw a much- 

 used brain-tract out of gear ; in the other it may affect an 

 unimportant region. A particularly instructive case was 

 published by Charcot in 1883.* The patient was 



Mr. X., a merchant, born in Vienna, highly educated, master of 

 German, Spanish, French, Greelc, and Latin. Up to the beginning of 

 the malady which took him to Professor Charcot, he read Homer at 

 sight. He could, starting from any verse out of the first book of the 

 Iliad, repeat the following verses without hesitating, by heart. Virgil 

 and Horace were familiar. He also knew enough of modern Greek for 

 business purposes. Up to within a year (from the time Charcot saw 

 him) he enjoyed an exceptional visual memory. He no sooner thought 

 of persons or things, but features, forms, and colors arose with the 

 same clearness, sharpness, and accuracy as if the objects stood before 

 him. When he tried to recall a fact or a figure in his voluminous 

 polyglot correspondence, the letters themselves appeared before him 

 with their entire content, irregularities, erasures and all. At school he 

 recited from a mentally seen page which he read off line by line and 

 letter by letter. In making computations, he ran his mental eye down 

 imaginary columns of figures, and performed in this way the most 

 varied operations of arithmetic. He could never think of a passage in 

 a play without the entire scene, stage, actors, and audience appearing 

 to him. He had been a great traveller. Being a good draughtsman, 

 he used to sketch views which pleased him; and his memory always 

 brought back the entire landscape exactly. If he thought of a conver- 

 sation, a saj'ing, an engagement, the place, the people, the entire scene 

 rose before his mind. 



His auditory memory was always deficient, or at least secondary. 

 He had no taste for music. 



* Progies ]Mcdital, 21 juillet. I abridge from the German report of 

 the case in Wilbrand : Die Seeleublindheit (1887). 



