Page:American Journal of Psychology Volume 21.djvu/611

Rh is a very poor visualizer, the frequency of his visual images in these experiments seems remarkable. They were, of course never more than vague, except in two significant reactions, where he had seen some striking picture that had made a deep impression upon his mind. Most of his visual images were of a symbolic character; e. g., a whole orchestra was represented by "a black spot with white specks in it," indicating the men in dress-suits and the white front of their shirts. Verbal ideas were by far the most numerous, ranging in degree from actual speech-movements to what G calls his "verbalizing tendency," in which sometimes a mere upward pressure of the tongue against the roof of the mouth indicates the beginning of a word or letter. In many cases the stimulus-word is simply supplemented to form a new (reaction-)word; e. g., "beauty" is completed by "ful" to stand for "beautiful." No less frequent are alliterations and synonyms, while rhymes and even nonsense-rhymes occur at times. These verbal processes are distributed over insignificant and significant cases with relatively equal frequency. Closely related to G's verbal ideas are the kinæsthetic elements of his consciousness. He frequently experienced strains indicating "a rigidity of the mouth and other speech-organs." Sometimes the mere "initial movement to close lips" leads to pronouncing a reaction-word beginning with b or p, such as "picture" or "boy." G often speaks of "a tendency to move," "to turn head," "to say something," or the like. In one case he had successively "several tendencies to move lips, but no anticipation of what was to come out," and in another case he made "several tentative lip and eye-movements." The latter are especially important for his whole mental make-up, as they frequently carry or represent to him the logical meaning of an idea. The symbolic character of the eye-strains and movements is, e. g., brought out in the following introspections: "I had eye-movements toward place on page where stimulus-word is found," or: "on my lips definitely the word 'sesame' (stimulus was "open was inhibited, then word "door" with reference to China, looking sideways to left, like studying map of whole world where China is on left side." (This map had been used in my high school course.) In a good many cases G could not indicate the psychological processes underlying his thoughts, meanings, and references. Several reasons for this fact may be inferred from his introspections. Sometimes the thoughts were too fleeting or too vague; e. g., "the thought came like a flash: that is good, safe," meaning of course that the reaction-word would not betray him. Or, sometimes, too many ideas occurred at once; "lots of things crossed my mind; ... ideas are