The Principles of Psychology, Volume 2 (of 2)James, William
Science
The Principles of Psychology, Volume 2 (of 2)
James, William
Psychology
"The _motor type_ remains--perhaps the most interesting of all, and
certainly the one of which least is known. Persons who belong to this
type [_les moteurs_, in French, _motiles_, as Mr. Galton proposes to
call them in English] make use, in memory, reasoning, and all their
intellectual operations, of images derived from movement. In order to
understand this important point, it is enough to remember that 'all
our perceptions, and in particular the important ones, those of sight
and touch, contain as integral elements the movements of our eyes and
limbs; and that, if movement is ever an essential factor in our really
seeing an object, it must be an equally essential factor when we see
the same object in imagination' (Ribot).[62] For example, the complex
impression of a ball, which is there, in our hand, is the resultant
of optical impressions of touch, of muscular adjustments of the eye,
of the movements of our fingers, and of the muscular sensations which
these yield. When we imagine the ball, its idea must include the
images of these muscular sensations, just as it includes those of the
retinal and epidermal sensations. They form so many _motor images_.
If they were not earlier recognized to exist, that is because our
knowledge of the muscular sense is relatively so recent. In older
psychologies it never was mentioned, the number of senses being
restricted to five.
"There are persons who remember a drawing better when they have
followed its outlines with their finger. Lecoq de Boisbaudran used
this means in his artistic teaching, in order to accustom his pupils
to draw from memory. He made them follow the outlines of figures with
a pencil held in the air, forcing them thus to associate muscular with
visual memory. Galton quotes a curious corroborative fact. Colonel
Moncrieff often observed in North America young Indians who, visiting
occasionally his quarters, interested themselves greatly in the
engravings which were shown them. One of them followed with care with
the point of his knife the outline of a drawing in the Illustrated
London News, saying that this was to enable him to carve it out the
better on his return home. In this ease the motor images were to
reinforce the visual ones. The young savage was a _motor_....[63]
When one's motor images are destroyed, one loses one's remembrance of
movements, and sometimes, more curiously still, one loses the power
of executing them. Pathology gives us examples in motor aphasia,
agraphia, etc. Take the case of agraphia. An educated man, knowing how
to write, suddenly loses this power, as a result of cerebral injury.
His hand and arm are in no way paralytic, yet he cannot write. Whence
this loss of power? He tells us himself: he no longer knows how. He
has forgotten how to set about it to trace the letters, he has lost
the memory of the movements to be executed, he has no longer the motor
images which, when formerly he wrote, directed his hand.... Other
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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