114 Inquiries into Human Faculty
words. The words had no connection with these except sometimes by accident. The instances I give are few and ridiculous. When I think of the word Beast, it has a face something like a gurgoyle. The word Green has also a gurgoyle face, with the addition of big teeth. The word Blue blinks and looks silly, and turns to the right. The word Attention has the eyes greatly turned to the left. It is difficult to draw them properly because, like Alice’s ‘Cheshire cat,’ which at times became a grin without a cat, these faces have expression without features. The expression of course” [note the naave phrase “of course.”—F. G.] “depends greatly on those of the letters, which have likewise their faces and figures. All the little a’s turn their eyes to the left, this determines the eyes of Attention. Ant, however, looks a little down. Of course these faces are endless as words are, and it makes my head ache to retain them long enough to draw.”
Some of the figures are very quaint. Thus the interrogation “what?” always excites the idea of a fat man cracking a long whip. They are not the capricious creations of the fancy of the moment, but are the regular concomitants of the words, and have been so as far back as the memory is able to recall.
When in perfect darkness, if the field of view be carefully watched, many persons will find a perpetual series of changes to be going on automatically and wastefully in it. I have much evidence of this. I will give my own experience the first, which is striking to me, because I am very unimpressionable in these matters. I visualise with effort; 1 am peculiarly inapt to see “after-images,” “phosphenes,” “lightdust,” and other phenomena due to weak sight or sensitiveness; and, again, before I thought of carefully trying, I should have emphatically declared that my field of view in the dark was essentially of a uniform black, subject to an occasional light-purple cloudiness and other small variations. Now, however, after habituating myself to examine it with the same sort of strain that one tries to decipher a signpost in the dark, I have found out that this is by no means the case, but that a kaleidoscopic change of patterns and forms is continually going on, but they are too fugitive and elaborate for me to draw with any approach to truth. I am astonished at their variety, and cannot guess in the remotest degree the cause of them. They disappear out of sight and
