Page:Bergson - Matter and Memory (1911).djvu/139

 just such habits or correspondences which are lost in certain forms of psychic blindness, the patient may still perhaps be able to draw bits of a line which he will connect together more or less well; but he will no longer be able to draw at a stroke, because the tendency to adopt and reproduce the general movement of the outline is no longer present in his hand. Now this is just what experiment verifies. Lissauer's observations are instructive on this head. His patient had the greatest difficulty in drawing simple objects; and if he tried to draw them from memory, he traced detached portions of them chosen at random, and was unable to unite these into a whole. Cases of complete psychic blindness are, however, rare. Those of word-blindness are much more numerous—cases of a loss, that is, of visual recognition limited to the characters of the alphabet. Now it is a fact of common observation that the patient, in such cases, is unable to seize what may be called the movement of the letters when he tries to copy them. He begins to draw them at any point, passing back and forth between the copy and the original to make sure that they agree. And this is the more remarkable in that he often retains unimpaired the faculty of writing from dictation or spontaneously. What is lost is clearly the habit of distinguishing the articulations of the object perceived, that is to say, of completing the visual