Page:Philosophical Review Volume 3.djvu/107

] an astronomer or mathematician would be likely to have no use for a year- or number-diagram. M. Flournoy, citing his own case of reliance on a partial number-form in calculating when cerebrally fatigued, says: "I feel like comparing the use of such schemata to that of spectacles; superfluous or even annoying when one's sight is good, they are a precious help . . . when one needs them. Unluckily, all who are in this plight have not the good luck to possess them. This is why, in spite of examples like Inaudi (the calculating prodigy, who has no 'number-form'), I hold visual schematization to be a great privilege; and having myself much difficulty in making mental calculations that go beyond the addition of single figures at a time, in foreseeing the days and the weeks, in not confounding one century with another, I envy profoundly those persons whose unconscious self furnishes them with fine diagrams ready-made for facilitating all such operations." M. Flournoy agrees with Messrs. Bleuler and Lehmann that we have no ground for supposing synoptic phenomena to be symptoms of a neuropathic constitution. As regards their genesis, it remains for the most part a mystery in the individual case, but a mystery concerning the general causes of which our author discourses with much good sense and penetration. Of the many factors which conspire to fix a photism in an individual—factors which often mutually annul each other's effects—the most important, according to Professor Flournoy, would seem to be what he calls 'affective association,' by which he means the common emotional tone aroused by inducer and induct. The emotional tones aroused by a low sound and a low color are more congruent than those aroused by a high and a low sound, although the two sounds, as sounds, are the more similar pair. Through the intermediary of the emotional tone, however, the low sound may arouse the representation (in an appropriate individual) of the low color. By reason of the organic sounding-board, an atmosphere of emotional tendency of some kind or other is ready in all of us to envelop almost any sensorial impression and idea; and in chosen individuals on a given occasion, some accidental coincidence in the mind of a sound with a visual idea and a strongly aroused common emotional tone, may stamp an association so strongly in the memory that it easily gets recalled, whilst each successive recall makes it more habitual and fixed, so that at last it becomes, so to speak, organic. M. Flournoy makes important remarks on the unaccountable privilege which certain moments of our life have of leaving impressions that are indelible. Associations then formed