"
In an earlier book of mine I have cited at full length a curious
case of presence felt by a blind man. The presence was that of
the figure of a gray-bearded man dressed in a pepper and salt
suit, squeezing himself under the crack of the door and moving
across the floor of the room towards a sofa. The blind subject
of this quasi-hallucination is an exceptionally intelligent
reporter. He is entirely without internal visual imagery and
cannot represent light or colors to himself, and is positive that
his other senses, hearing, etc., were not involved in this false
perception. It seems to have been an abstract conception rather,
with the feelings of reality and spatial outwardness directly
attached to it--in other words, a fully objectified and
exteriorized IDEA.
Such cases, taken along with others which would be too tedious
for quotation, seem sufficiently to prove the existence in our
mental machinery of a sense of present reality more diffused and
general than that which our special senses yield. For the
psychologists the tracing of the organic seat of such a feeling
would form a pretty problem--nothing could be more natural than
to connect it with the muscular sense, with the feeling that our
muscles were innervating themselves for action.
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