62 PSYCHOLOGY, 



reinforce the visual ones. The young savage was a tnotor* . . . When 

 one's motor images are destroyed, one loses one's remembrance of move- 

 ments, and sometimes, more curiously still, one loses the power of exe- 

 cuting them. Pathology gives us examples in motor aphasia, agraphia, 

 etc. Take the case of agraphia. An educated man, knowing how to 

 write, suddenly loses this power, as a result of cerc'oral injui*y. His 

 hand and arm are in no way paralytic, yet he cannot write. Whence 

 this loss of power ? He tells us himself : he no longer knows how. He 

 has forgotten how to set about it to trace the letters, he has lost the 

 memory of the movements to be executed, he has no longer the motor 

 images which, when formerly he wrote, directed his hand. . . . Other 

 patients, affected with word-blindness, resort to these motor images 

 precisely to make amends for their other deficiency. . . . An individ- 

 ual affected in this way cannot read letters which are phiced before his 

 eyes, even although his sight be good enough for the purpose. This loss 

 of the power of reading by sight may, at a certain time, be the only 

 trouble the patient has. Individuals thus mutilated succeed in reading 

 by an ingenious roundabout way which they often discover themselves : 

 it is enough that they should trace the letters with their finger to under- 

 stand their sense. What happens in such a case? How can the hand 

 supply the place of the eye? The motor image gives the key to the 

 problem. If the patient can read, so to speak, with his fingers, it is 

 because in tracing the letters he gives himself a certain number of mus- 

 •cular impressions which are those of writing. In one word, the patient 

 reads by writing (Charcot): the feeling of the graphic movements sug- 

 gests the sense of what is being written as well as sight would." f 



The imagination of a blind-deaf mute like Laura Bridg- 

 man must be confined entirely to tactile and motor material. 

 All blind persons must belong to the * tactile ' and 'motile' types of 

 the French authors. "When the young man whose cataracts 

 •were removed by Dr. Franz was shown different geometric 

 figures, he said he " had not been able to form from them 

 the idea of a square and a disk until he perceived a sensa- 

 tion of what he saw in the points of his fingers, as if he 

 really touched the objects." :j: 



Professor Strieker of Vienna, who seems to have the 

 motile form of imagination developed in unusual strength, 



* It is hardly needful to say that in modern primary education, in which 

 the blackboard is so much used, the children are taught their letters, etc., 

 by all possible channels at once, sight, hearing, and movement. 



f See an interesting case of a similar sort, reported by Farges, in I'En- 

 cephale, 7me An nee, p. 545. 



X Philosophical Transactions, 1841, p. 65. 



