THE PEBCEPTION OF SPACE. 207 



shown a portrait in a locket, he was vastly surprised that 

 the face could be put into so small a compass : it would 

 have seemed to him, he said, as impossible as to put a bushel 

 into a pint.) Be this as it may, however, the space which 

 oach blind man feels to extend beyond his body is felt by 

 him as one smooth continuum — all trace of those muscular 

 startings and stoppings and reversals which presided over 

 its formation having been eliminated from the memory. It 

 seems, in other words, a generic image of the space-element 

 common to all these experiences, with the unessential par- 

 ticularities of each left out. In truth, ivhere in this sj)ace 

 a start or a stop may have occurred was quite accidental. 

 It may never occur just there again, and so the attention 

 lets it drops altogether. Even as long a space as that 

 traversed in a several-mile walk will not necessarily ajjj^ear 

 to a blind man's thought in the guise of a series of locomo- 

 tor acts. Only where there is some distinct locomotor diffi- 

 culty, such as a step to ascend, a difficult crossing, or a 

 disajDpearance of the path, will distinct locomotor images 

 constitute the idea. Elsewhere the space seems continuous, 

 and its parts may even all seem coexistent ; though, as a 

 very intelligent blind friend once remarked to me, ' To 

 think of such distances involves probably more mental 

 wear and tear and brain-waste in the blind than in the see- 

 ing.' This seems to point to a greater element of succes- 

 sive addition and construction in the blind man's idea. 



Our own visual explorations go on by means of innum- 

 erable stoppings and startings of the eyeballs. Yet these 

 are all effaced from the final space-sphere of our visual 

 imagination. They have neutralized each other. We can 

 even distribute our attention to the right and left sides 

 simultaneously, and think of those two quarters of sj^ace 

 as coexistent. Does the smoothing out of the locomotor 

 interruptions from the blind man's tactile space-sphere 

 offer any greater paradox? Surely net. Audit is curious 

 to note that both in him and in us there is one particular 

 locomotor feeling that is apt to assert itself obstinately to 

 the last. We and he alike spontaneously imagine space as 

 lying in front of us, for reasons too obvious to enumerate. 

 If we think of the space behind us, we, as a rule, have to 



