have many cases of persons mentally reading off scores when
playing the pianoforte, or manuscript when they are making speeches.
One statesman has assured me that a certain hesitation in utterance
which he has at times, is due to his being plagued by the image of
his manuscript speech with its original erasures and corrections. He
cannot lay the ghost, and he puzzles in trying to decipher it.

Some few persons see mentally in print every word that is uttered;
they attend to the visual equivalent and not to the sound of the
words, and they read them off usually as from a long imaginary strip
of paper, such as is unwound from telegraphic instruments. The
experiences differ in detail as to size and kind of type, colour of
paper, and so forth, but are always the same in the same person.

A well-known frequenter of the Royal Institution tells me that he
often craves for an absence of visual perceptions, they are so
brilliant and persistent. The Rev. George Henslow speaks of their
extreme restlessness; they oscillate, rotate, and change.

It is a mistake to suppose that sharp sight is accompanied by clear
visual memory. I have not a few instances in which the independence
of the two faculties is emphatically commented on; and I have at
least one clear case where great interest in outlines and accurate
appreciation of straightness, squareness, and the like, is
unaccompanied by the power of visualising. Neither does the faculty
go with dreaming. I have cases where it is powerful, and at the same
time where dreams are rare and faint or altogether absent. One
friend tells me that his dreams have not the hundredth part of the
vigour of his waking fancies.

The visualising and the identifying powers are by no means
necessarily combined. A distinguished writer on meta-physical topics
assures me that he is exceptionally quick at recognising a face that
he has seen before, but that he cannot call up a mental image of any
face with clearness.

Some persons have the power of combining in a single perception more
than can be seen at any one moment by the two eyes. It is needless
to insist on the fact that all who have two eyes see stereoscopically,
and therefore somewhat round a corner. Children, who can focus their
eyes on very near objects, must be able to comprise in a single
mental image much more than a half of any small object they are
examining. Animals such as hares, whose eyes are set more on the
side of the head than ours