Page:Bergson - Matter and Memory (1911).djvu/138

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116
MATTER AND MEMORY
CHAP. II

liarity. Lissauer's patient had completely lost the faculty of finding his way about his own house.[1] Fr. Müller insists on the fact that, while blind men soon learn to find their way, the victim of psychic blindness fails, even after months of practice, to find his way about his own room.[2] But is not this faculty of orientation the same thing as the faculty of coördinating the movements of the body with the visual impression, and of mechanically prolonging perceptions in useful reactions?

There is a second, and even more characteristic fact, and that is the manner in which these patients draw. We can conceive two fashions of drawing. In the first we manage, by tentative efforts, to set down here and there on the paper a certain number of points, and we then connect them together, verifying continually the resemblance between the drawing and the object. This is what is known as 'point to point' drawing. But our habitual method is quite different. We draw with a continuous line, after having looked at, or thought of, our model. How shall we explain such a faculty, except by our habit of discovering at once the organization of the outlines of common objects, that is to say, by a motor tendency to draft their diagram in one continuous line? But if it is

  1. Op. cit., Arch. f. Psychiatrie, 1889–90, p. 224. Cf. Wilbrand, op. cit., p. 140, and Bernhardt, Eigenthümlicher Fall von Hirnerkrankung (Berliner klinische Wochenschrift, 1877, p. 581).
  2. Op. cit., Arch. f. Psychiatric, vol. xxiv, p. 898.