Movement is another thing difficult to represent or imagine. You can
determine for yourself immediately whether you can imagine even a
slightly complicated movement. I can imagine one individual condition of
a movement after another, sequentially, but I can not imagine the
sequence. As Herbart says somewhere, a successive series of images is
not a represented succession. But if we can not imagine this latter,
what do we imagine is not what it ought to be. According to
Stricker,[202] the representation of movement is a _quale_ which can not
be given in terms of any other sensory quality, and no movement can be
remembered without the brain’s awakening a muscle-movement. Experience
verifies this theory. The awakening of the muscular sense is frequently
obvious whenever movement is thought of, and we may then perceive how,
in the explanation or description of a movement, the innervation which
follows the image in question, occurs. This innervation is always true.
It agrees at least with what the witness has himself perceived and now
tries to renew in his story. When we have him explain, for example, how
some man had been choked, we may see movements of his hands which,
however slight and obscure, still definitely indicate that he is trying
to remember what he has seen, and this irrelevantly of what he is
saying. This makes it possible to observe the alterations of images in
the individual in question, an alteration which always occurs when the
images are related to movements.
It follows further from the fact that movements are difficult to
represent that the witness ought not to be expected accurately to recall
them. Stricker says that for a long time he could not image a snow-fall,
and succeeded only in representing one single instant of it. Now what is
not capable of representation, can not well be recalled, and so we
discover that it merely causes trouble to ask the witness to describe
point by point even a simple sequence. The witness has only successive
images, and even if the particular images are correct, he has nothing
objective for the succession itself, nothing rooted in the sequence. He
is helped, merely, by the logic of events and his memory--if these are
scanty, the succession of images is scanty, and therefore the
reproduction of the event is inadequate. Hence this scantiness is as
little remarkable as the variety of description in various witnesses, a
variety due to the fact that the sequentialization is subjective.
Drawing is a confirmation of the fact that we represent only a single
instant of motion, for a picture can never give us a movement, but only
a single state within that movement. At the same time we are content
with what the picture renders, even when our image contains only this
simple moment of movement. “What is seen or heard, is immediately, in
all its definiteness, content of consciousness” (Schuppe)--but its
movement is not.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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