Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 51.djvu/121

Rh M. F always outside of him, but very near—hardly a yard away; he is and always has been of the same size as he, from which he concludes that they have grown up together. The man of Wednesday and Friday, on the other hand, is always seen at a considerable distance more than fifty yards.

M. F does not personify any figure or number, except 14, which represents itself to him as an accountant sitting at his desk, writing. Of the months and seasons, only autumn is personified, as the same sad-looking man with his finger on his eye who represents Monday and Tuesday.

Most of the common nouns are associated with personifications, or rather were; for the phenomena were formerly much more numerous and persistent than now. M. F does not recollect having ever had such visions for isolated syllables, articles, pronouns, and other words without special significance; yet, at an age when he knew nothing of the gender of words or of sex, the letters of the alphabet called up—some (A, B, C, D, etc.) the image of a pair of trousers, and others (as H, M, N, R, etc.) of a robe. Words of a positive significance invoked representations largely independent of their real sense. Bottle, for instance, invoked and still invokes the image of a large woman, laughing, sitting on a little backed bench, with a table in front of her, but no other suggestion of a bottle in the vision. Shark (requin) is personified in a large horse stationed near the subject and by the side of a load of hay.

These parasitical representations, grafted on the word and always accompanying it, were often considerable impediments to conversation and reading. Now, with a few exceptions—such as the days of the week, the figures of which are still very intense—the images do not rise in the course of conversation or of an interesting reading, but they appear readily enough on reflection or when the book is a dull one. The relations of the personification and of the real idea are reversed in this way: Formerly the induced representation preceded the thought of the proper meaning; now it comes after it or remains latent, except in a few instances—as, for example, shark, where the image of the load of hay and the horse appears before the idea of the fish. M. F believes that his personifications reached their greatest intensity in his childhood, when he was seven or eight years old, and that they have progressively diminished since he was twelve. He formerly thought that as a rule everybody had similar impressions, but he was met with surprise and ridicule when he spoke of them to others.

M. F can say nothing of the cause of these curious phenomena; he finds them as far back as his recollection can reach, almost unvarying in intensity and inexplicable. A very small