rary, we
believe it to be a fundamental condition for the existence of intuition
itself. Without all these imperceptible tracing movements with which our
body accompanies the adaptation of the eye-muscles to the outlines of
external objects, our notions of depth, height, and distance, and so on,
would certainly be far less distinct than they are. On the other hand,
the habit of executing such movements has, so to say, brought the
external world within the sphere of the internal. The world has been
measured with man as a standard, and objects have been translated into
the language of mental experience. The impressions have hereby gained,
not only in emotional tone, but also in intellectual comprehensibility.

Greater still is the importance of imitation for our intuition of moving
objects. And a difficult movement itself is fully understood only when
it has been imitated, either internally or in actual outward activity.
The idea of a movement, therefore, is generally associated with an
arrested impulse to perform it. Closer introspection will show everyone
to how great a part our knowledge, even of persons, is built up of motor
elements. By unconscious and imperceptible copying in our own body the
external behavior of a man, we may learn to understand him with
benevolent or malevolent sympathy. And it will, no doubt, be admitted
by most readers that the reason why they know their friends and foes
better than they know anyone else is that they carry the remembrance of
them not only in their eyes, but in their whole body. When in idle
moments we find the memory of an absent friend surging up in our minds
with no apparent reason, we may often note, to our astonishment, that we
have just been unconsciously adopting one of his characteristic
attitudes, or imitating his peculiar gestures or gait.

It may, however, be objected that the above-mentioned instances refer
only to a particular class of individuals. In other minds, it will be
said, the world-picture is entirely built up of visual and acoustic
elements. It is also impossible to deny that the classification of minds
in different types, which modern psychology has introduced, is as
legitimate as it is advantageous for the purposes of research. But we
can hardly believe that such divisions have in view anything more than a
relative predominance of the several psychical elements. It is easily
understood that a man in whose store of memory visual or acoustic images
occupy