IMAGINATION. 65 



Professor Strieker himself has acoustic images, and can 

 imagine the sounds of musical instruments, and the pecul- 

 iar voice of a friend. A statistical inquiry on a large scale, 

 into the variations of acoustic, tactile, and motor imagina- 

 tion, would probably bear less fruit than Galton's inquiry 

 into visual images. A few monographs by comjDetent ob- 

 servers, like Strieker, about their own peculiarities, would 

 give much more valuable information about the diversities 

 which prevail.* 



Touch-images are very strong in some peojDle. The most 

 vivid touch-images come when we ourselves barely escape 

 local injury, or when we see another injured. The place 



* I think it must be admitted that some people have no vivid substan- 

 tive images in any department of their sensibility. One of my students, 

 an intelligent youth, denied so pertinaciously that there was anytJiing in his 

 mind at all when he thought, that I was much perplexed by his case. I my- 

 self certainly have no such vivid pla}" of nascent movements or motor images 

 as Professor Strieker describes. When I seek to represent a row of soldiers 

 marching, all I catch is a view of stationary legs first in one phase of 

 movement and then in another, and these views are extremely imperfect 

 and momentary. Occasionally (especially when I try to stimulate my 

 imagination, as by repeating Victor Hugo's lines about the regiment, 

 '■ Leur pas est si correct, sans tarder ni courir, 

 Qu'on croit voir des ciseaux se farmer et s'ouvrir,") 



I seem to get an instantaneous glimpse of an actual movement, but it is to 

 the last degree dim and uncertain. All these images seem at first as if 

 purely retinal. 1 think, however, that rapid eye-movements accompany 

 them, though these latter give rise to such slight feelings that they are 

 almost impossible of detection. Absolutely no leg-movements of my own 

 are there ; in fact, to call such up arrests my imagination of the soldiers. 

 My optical images are in general very dim, dark, fugitive, and contracted. 

 It would be utterly impossible to drato from them, and yet I perfectly well 

 distinguish one from the other. My auditory images are excessively inade- 

 quate reproductions of their originals. I have no images of taste or smell. 

 Touch-imagination is fairly distinct, but comes very little into play with 

 most objects thought of. Neither is all my thought verbalized; for I have 

 shadowy schemes of relation, as apt to terminate in a nod of the head or an 

 expulsion of the breath as in a definite word. On the whole, vague images 

 or sensations of movement inside of my head towards the various parts of 

 space in which the terms I am thinking of either lie or are momentarily sym- 

 bolized to lie together with movements of the breath through my pharynx 

 and nostrils, form a by no means inconsiderable part of my thovght-staff. 

 I doubt whether my difficulty in giving a clearer account is wholly a mat- 

 ter of inferior power of introspective attention, though that doubtless playa 

 its part. Attention, ceteris paribus, must always be inferior in proportion 

 to the feebleness of the internal images which are offered it to hold on to. 



