When, however, we come on to the delineation of an object under its different aspects the defects of mental representation assume a much graver character. We must bear in mind that a child soon gets beyond the stage of recalling and imagining the particular look of an object, say the front view of his mother’s face, or of his house. He begins as soon as he understands and imitates others’ language to synthesise such pictorial images of particular visual presentations or appearances into the wholes which we call ideas of things. A child of four or five thinking of his father or his house probably recalls in a confused way disparate and incompatible visual aspects, the front view as on the whole the most impressive being predominant, though striking elements of the side view may rise into consciousness also. With this process of synthesising aspects into the concrete whole we call a thing there goes the further process of binding together representations of this and that thing into generic or typical ideas answering to man, horse, house, in general. A child of five or six, so far from being immersed in individual presentations and concrete objects, as is often supposed, has carried out a respectable measure of generalisation, and this largely by the help of language. Thus a ‘man’ reduced to visual terms has come to mean for him (according to his well-known verbal formula) something with a head, two eyes, etc., etc., which he does not need to represent in a mental picture because the verbal formula serves to connect the features in his memory. Hence when he comes to draw he has not the artist’s clear mental vision of the actual look of things to guide him. He is led not by a lively and clear sensuous imagination, but by a mass of generalised knowledge embodied in words, _viz._, the logical form of a definition or description. This, I take it, is the main reason why with such supreme insouciance he throws into one design features of the full face and of the profile; for in setting down his linear scheme he is aiming not at drawing a picture, an imitative representation of something we could see, but rather at enumerating, in the new expressive medium which his pencil supplies, what he knows about the particular thing. Since he is thus bent on a linear description of what he knows he is not in the least troubled about the laws of visual appearance, but setting perspective at naught compels the spectator to see the other side, to look through one object at another, and so forth.