this theory is led by psychological analysis on the one hand, by pathological facts on the other. On the one hand, it would seem that if perception, once it has taken place, remains in the brain in the state of a stored-up memory, this can only be as an acquired disposition of the very elements that perception has affected: how, at what precise moment, can it go in search of others? This is, indeed, the most natural hypothesis, and Bain[1] and Ribot[2] are content to rest upon it. But, on the other hand, there is pathology, which tells us that all the recollections of a certain kind may have gone while the corresponding faculty of perception remains unimpaired. Psychic blindness does not hinder seeing, any more than psychic deafness hinders hearing. More particularly, in regard to the loss of the auditory memory of words—the only one we are now considering—there are a number of facts which show it to be regularly associated with a destructive lesion of the first and second left temporo-sphenoidal convolutions,[3] though not a single case is on record in which this lesion was the cause of deafness properly so-called:
- ↑ The Senses and the Intellect, p. 329. Cf. Spencer, Principles of Psychology, vol. i., p. 456.
- ↑ Ribot, Les maladies de la mémoire. Paris, 1881, p. 10.
- ↑ See an enumeration of the most typical cases in Shaw's article, The Sensory Side of Aphasia (Brain, 1893, p. 501).—Several authors, however, limit to the first convolution the lesion corresponding to the loss of verbal auditory images. See, in particular, Ballet, Le langage intérieur, p. 153.
