< Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 19.djvu
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THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.
changed into a leather strap with loops, but while he still endeavored to change it into a bow the strap broke, the two ends were separated, but it happened that an imaginary string connected them. This was the first concession of his automatic chain of thoughts to his will. By a continued effort the bow came, and then no difficulty was felt in converting it into the cross-bow and thus returning to the starting-point.

I have a sufficient variety of cases to prove the continuity between all the forms of visualization, beginning with an almost total absence of it, and ending with a complete hallucination. The continuity is, however, not simply that of varying degrees of intensity, but of variations in the character of the process itself, so that it is by no means uncommon to find two very different forms of it concurrent in the same person. There are some who visualize well and who also are seers of visions, who declare that the vision is not a vivid visualization, but altogether a different phenomenon. In short, if we please to call all sensations due to external impressions "direct," and all others "induced," then there are many channels through which the induction may take place, and the channel of ordinary visualization in the persons just mentioned is very different from that through which their visions arise.

The following is a good instance of this condition. A friend writes:

These visions often appear with startling vividness, and, so far from depending on any voluntary effort of the mind, they remain when I often wish them very much to depart, and no effort of the imagination can call them up. I lately saw a framed portrait of a face which seemed more lovely than any painting I have ever seen, and again I often see fine landscapes which bear no resemblance to any scenery I have ever looked upon. I find it difficult to define the difference between a waking vision and a mental image, although the difference is very apparent to myself. I think I can do it best in this way: If you go into a theatre and look at a scene, say of a forest by moonlight, at the back part of the stage, you see every object distinctly and sufficiently illuminated (being thus unlike a mere act of memory), but it is nevertheless vague and shadowy, and you might have difficulty in telling afterward all the objects you have seen. This resembles a mental image in point of clearness. The waking vision is like what one sees in the open street in broad daylight, when every object is distinctly impressed on the memory. The two kinds of imagery differ also as regards voluntariness, the image being entirely subservient to the will, the visions entirely independent of it. They differ also in point of suddenness, the images being formed comparatively slowly as memory recalls each detail, and fading slowly as the mental effort to retain them is relaxed; the visions appearing and vanishing in an instant. The waking visions seem quite close, filling as it were the whole head, while the mental image seems farther away in some far-off recess of the mind.

The number of persons who see visions no less distinctly than this correspondent is much greater than I had any idea of when I began this inquiry. I have in my possession the sketch of one, prefaced by a description of it by Mrs. Haweis. She says:

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