IMAGINATION. 61 



dividuals afflicted with the mania that they are victims of persecution, 

 may all belong to the auditory type ; and that the predominance of a 

 certain kind of imagination may predispose to a certain order of hal- 

 lucinations, and perhaps of delirium. 



"The motor type remains — perhaps the most interesting of all, 

 and certainly the one of which least is known. Persons who belong to 

 this type [les moteurs, in French, mottles, as Mr. Galton proposes to 

 call them in English] make use, in memory, reasoning, and all their 

 intellectual operations, of images derived from movement. In order to 

 understand this important point, it is enough to remember that ' all 

 our perceptions, and in particular the important ones, those of sight 

 and touch, contain as integral elements the movements of our eyes and 

 limbs ; and that, if movement is ever an essential factor m our really 

 seeing an object, it must be an equally essential factor when we see the 

 same object in imagination ' (Ribot).* For example, the complex im- 

 pression of a ball, which is there, in our hand, is the resultant of optical 

 impressions of touch, of muscular adjustments of the eye, of the move- 

 ments of our fingers, and of the muscular sensations which these yield. 

 When we imagine the ball, its idea must include the images of these 

 muscular sensations, just as it includes those of the retinal and epider- 

 mal sensations. They form so many motor images. If they were not 

 earlier recognized to exist, that is because our knowledge of the muscu- 

 lar sense is relatively so recent. In older psychologies it never was 

 mentioned, the number of senses being restricted to five. 



" There are persons who remember a drawing better when they have 

 followed its outlines with their finger. Lecoq de Boisbaudran used this 

 means in his artistic teaching, in order to accustom his pupils to draw 

 from memory. He made them follow the outlines of figures with a 

 pencil held in the air, forcing them thus to associate muscular with 

 visual memory. Galton quotes a curious corroborative fact. Colonel 

 Moncriefi: often observed in North America young Indians who, visit- 

 ing occasionally his quarters, interested themselves greatly in the 

 engravings which were shown them. One of them followed with care 

 with the point of his knife the outline of a drawing in the Illustrated 

 London News, saying that this was to enable him to carve it out the 

 better on his return home. In this case the motor images were to 



* [I am myself a very poor visualizer, and find that I can seldom call to 

 mind even a single letter of the alphabet in purely retinal terms. I must 

 trace the letter by running ray mental eye over its contour in order that 

 the image of it shall have any distinctness at all. On questioning a large 

 number of other people, mostly students, I find that perhaps half of them 

 say they have no such difficulty in seeing letters mentally. Many affirm 

 that they can see an entire word at once, especially a short one like ' dog,' 

 with no such feeling of creating the letters successively by tracing them 

 with the eye.— W. J.l 



