The role of tactile-motor images is not insignificant. There has often been cited the instance of sculptors who, becoming blind, have nevertheless been able to fashion busts of close resemblance to the original. This is memory of touch and of the muscular sense, entirely equivalent to the visual memory of the portrait painters mentioned above. Practical knowledge of design and modeling--i.e., of contour and relief--though resulting from natural or acquired disposition, depends on cerebral conditions, the development of definite sensory-motor regions and their connections; and on psychological conditions--the acquisition and organization of appropriate images. "We learn to paint and carve," wrote a contemporary painter, "as we do sewing, embroidery, sawing, filing and turning." In short, like all manual labor requiring associated and combined acts. 2. Another form of plastic imagination uses words as means for evoking vivid and clear impressions of sight, touch, movement; it is the poetic or literary form. Of it we find in Victor Hugo a finished type. As all know, we need only open his works at hazard to find a stream of glittering images. But what is their nature? His recent biographers, guided by contemporary psychology, have well shown that they always paint scenes or movements. It is unnecessary to give proofs. Some facts have a broader range and throw light upon his psychology. Thus we are told that "he never dictates or rhymes from memory and composes only in writing, for he believes that writing has its own features, and he wants to _see the words_. Theophile Gautier, who knows and understands him so well, says: 'I also believe that in the sentence we need most of all an _ocular_ rhythm. A book is made to be read, not to be spoken aloud.'" It is added that "Victor Hugo never spoke his verses but wrote them out and would often illustrate them on the margin, as if he needed to fixate the image in order to find the appropriate word."[83] After visual representations come those of movement: the steeple _pierces_ the horizon, the mountain _rends_ the cloud, the mountain _raises himself_ and looks about, "the cold caverns open their mouths _drowsily_," the wind lashes the rock into tears with the waterfall, the thorn is an enraged plant, and so on indefinitely. A more curious fact is the transposition of sonorous sensations or images of sound, and like them without form or figure, into visual and motor images: "The _ruffles_ of sound that the fifer cuts out; the flute _goes up_ to alto like a frail capital on a column." This thoroughly plastic imagination remains identical with itself while reducing everything spontaneously, unconsciously, to spatial terms.