Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 33.djvu/618

600 haunted by the chess-board at night. An artist painting an imaginary portrait saw the figure in his walks, saw it move, at length came to believe in its reality, and became insane. The creations of genius are sometimes similarly realized: Dickens walked the streets with "Little Nell" at his side. All such phenomena are likely to appear as visual; in dreaming, these are decidedly most frequent and prominent (in fact, we call a dream a "vision"); in hypnotism an imaginary visual sensation is easily induced; in incipient as in pronounced insanity, visual illusions and hallucinations are the most usual.

All these facts illustrate the leading role that vision plays in mental life—or, to speak physiologically, the high development of the cortical sight-center in man and its associative dominance over other cortical centers—as well as the great variety of its development in different individuals. Next to sight, the intellectually most valuable sense is hearing; that it owes much of this importance to its function as the medium of spoken language goes without saying. As in sight, so in hearing, the ease of perception and the clearness and accuracy of one's remembrance of musical or other sounds are subject to wide individual variations. Again, there are persons who possess this "auditizing" power to an unusual degree; to this class belong Mozart, who remembered the "Miserere" of the Sistine Chapel after two hearings; Beethoven, composing and silently repeating to himself whole symphonies after his deafness; "Blind Tom," performing any musical composition, however fantastic, after a single hearing, and so on. In ordinary experience, many persons reveal their dependence on auditory impressions by repeating things out loud to remember them, by closing their eyes and assuming the attitude of listening when trying to recall a word, and so on. Among the blind I have found many a good example of this type of mind, just as good visualizers are probably abundant among the deaf-mutes. A good illustration of the difference between what I shall term a "visionaire" and an "auditaire" is furnished by the conversation between the two dramatists, Legouvé and Scribe. "When I write up a scene," said Legouvé to Scribe, "I hear it; you see it; for every phrase I write, the voice of the character speaking it strikes my ear. You are the theatre itself; your actors walk and act under your eyes; I am of the audience, you of the spectators." "Nothing could be truer," said Scribe.

Instances in which certain forms or colors call up certain sounds are on record, though they occur much less frequently than the reverse. In one case the sight of the full moon looked at through a red glass has the sound of l joined to o. In dreams, hearing enters next frequently to sight (though in many cases the tactual-motor sensations predominate); in hypnotism an auditory