Once more, _these cases form an extreme. Somewhere, in the list of our imaginations of absent feelings, there must be found the vividest of all. These optical reproductions of real form are the vividest of all._ It is foolish to reason from cases lower in the scale, to prove that the scale can contain no such extreme cases as these; and particularly foolish since we can definitely see why these imaginations ought to be more vivid than any others, whenever they recall the forms of habitual and probable things. These latter, by incessantly repeated presence and reproduction, will plough deep grooves in the nervous system. There will be developed, to correspond to them, paths of least resistance, of unstable equilibrium, liable to become active in their totality when any point is touched off. Even when the objective stimulus is imperfect, we shall still _see_ the full convexity of a human face, the correct inclination of an angle or sweep of a curve, or the distance of two lines. Our mind will be like a polyhedron, whose facets are the attitudes of perception in which it can most easily rest. These are worn upon it by _habitual_ objects, and from one of these it can pass only by tumbling over into another.[250] Hering has well accounted for the sensationally vivid character of these habitually reproduced forms. He says, after reminding us that every visual sensation is correlated to a physical process in the nervous apparatus: "If this psycho-physical process is aroused, as usually happens, by light-rays impinging on the retina, its form depends not only on the nature of these rays, but on the constitution of the entire nervous apparatus which is connected with the organ of vision, and on the _state_ in which it finds itself. The same stimulus may excite widely different sensations according to this state. "The constitution of the nervous apparatus depends naturally in part upon innate predisposition; but the _ensemble_ of effects wrought by stimuli upon it in the course of life, whether these come through the eyes or from elsewhere, is a co-factor of its development. To express it otherwise, involuntary and voluntary experience and exercise assist in determining the material structure of the nervous organ of vision, and hence the ways in which it may react on a retinal image as an outward stimulus. That experience and exercise should be possible at all in vision is a consequence of the reproductive power, or memory, of its nerve-substance. Every particular activity of the organ makes it more suited to a repetition of the _same_; ever slighter touches are required to make the repetition occur. The organ habituates itself to the repeated activity....