[62] [I am myself a very poor visualizer, and find that I can seldom call to mind even a single letter of the alphabet in purely retinal terms. I must trace the letter by running my mental eye over its contour in order that the image of it shall have any distinctness at all. On questioning a large number of other people, mostly students, I find that perhaps half of them say they have no such difficulty in seeing letters mentally. Many affirm that they can see an entire word at once, especially a short one like 'dog,' with no such feeling of creating the letters successively by tracing them with the eye.--W. J.] [63] It is hardly needful to say that in modern primary education, in which the blackboard is so much used, the children are taught their letters, etc., by all possible channels at once, sight, hearing, and movement. [64] See an interesting case of a similar sort, reported by Farges, in l'Encéphale, 7me Année, p. 545. [65] Philosophical Transactions, 1841, p. 65. [66] Studien über die Sprachvorstellungen (1880), and Studien über die Bewegungsvorstellungen (1882). [67] Prof. Stricker admits that by practice he has succeeded in making his eye-movements 'act vicariously' for his leg-movements in imagining men walking. [68] Bewegungsvorstellungen, p. 6. [69] Bain: Senses and Intellect, p. 339. [70] Studien über Sprachvorstellungen, 28, 31, etc. Cf. pp. 49-50, etc. Against Stricker, see Stumpf, Tonpsychol., 155-162, and Revue Philosophique, xx. 617. See also Paulhan, Rev. Philosophique, xvi. 405. Stricker replies to Paulhan in vol. xviii. p. 685. P. retorts in vol. xix p. 118. Stricker reports that out of 100 persons questioned he found only _one_ who had _no_ feeling in his lips when silently thinking the letters M, B, P; and out of 60 only _two_ who were conscious of no internal articulation whilst reading (pp. 59-60). [71] I think it must be admitted that some people have no vivid substantive images in _any_ department of their sensibility. One of my students, an intelligent youth, denied so pertinaciously that there was _anything_ in his mind _at all_ when he thought, that I was much perplexed by his case. I myself certainly have no such vivid play of nascent movements or motor images as Professor Stricker describes. When I seek to represent a row of soldiers marching, all I catch is a view of stationary legs first in one phase of movement and then in another, and these views are extremely imperfect and momentary. Occasionally (especially when I try to stimulate my imagination, as by repeating Victor Hugo's lines about the regiment, "Leur pas est si correct, sans tarder ni courir, Qu'on croit voir des ciseaux se fermer et s'ouvrir,")