Prof.Stricker admits that by practice he has succeeded in ****** his eye-movements 'act vicariously' for his leg-movements in imagining men walking.
Bewegungsvorstellugen, p.6.
Bain: Senses and Intellect, p.339.
Studien über Sprachvorstellungen, 28, 31 etc.Cf.pp.49-50, etc.Against Stricker, see Stumpf, Tonpsychol., 155-162, and Revue Philosophique, xx.617.See also Paulhan, Rev.Philosophique, xvi.405.Stricker replies to Paulhan in vol.xviii.p.685.P.retorts in vol.xix.p.118.Stricker reports that out of 100 persons questioned he found only one who had no feeling in his lips when silently thinking the letters M, B, P; and out of 60 only two who were conscious of no internal articulation whilst reading (pp.59-60).
I think it must be admitted that some people have no vivid substantive images in any department of their sensibility.One of my students, an Intelligent youth, denied so pertinaciously that there was anything in his mind at all when he thought, that I was much perplexed by his case.I myself certainly have no such vivid play of nascent movements or motor images as Professor Stricker describes.When I seek to represent a row of soldiers marching, all I catch is a view of stationary legs first in one phase of movement and then in another, and these views are extremely imperfect and momentary.Occasionally (especially when I try to stimulate my imagination, as by repeating Victor Hugo's lines about the regiment, Leur pas est si correct, sans tarder ni courir, Qu'on croit voir des ciseaux se fermer et s'ouvrir,")
I seem to get an instantaneous glimpse of an actual movement, but it is to the last degree dim and uncertain.
All these images seem at first as if purely retinal.I think, however, that rapid eye-movements accompany them, though these latter give rise to such slight feelings that they are almost impossible of detection.Absolutely no leg-movements of my own are there; in fact, to call such up arrests my imagination of the soldiers.My optical images are in general very dim, dark, fugitive, and contracted.It would be utterly impossible to draw from them, and yet I perfectly well distinguish one from the other.
My auditory images are excessively inadequate reproductions of their originals.
I have no images of taste or smell.Touch-imagination is fairly distinct, but comes very little into play with most objects thought of.
Neither is all my thought verbalized; for I have shadowy schemes of relation, as apt to terminate in a nod of the head or an expulsion of the breath as in a definite word.On the whole, vague images or sensations of movement inside of my head towards the various parts of space in which the terms I am thinking of either lie or are momentarily symbolized to lie together with movements of the breath through my pharynx and nostrils, form a by no means inconsiderable part of my thought-stuff.I doubt whether my difficulty in giving a clearer account is wholly a matter of inferior power of introspective attention, though that doubtless plays its part.
Attention, ceteris paribus , must always be inferior in proportion to the feebleness of the internal images which are offered it to hold on to.
Geo.Herm.Meyer, Untersuchungen üb.d.Physiol.d, Nervenfaser (1848) p.238.For other cases see Tuke's Influence of Mind upon Body, chaps.ii and vii.
Meyer, op.cit.p.238.
Classics editor's note: James' insertion.
