Note 195 — Chapter XX · (continued 2)

I have said hardly anything about associations with visual space in the foregoing account, because I wished to represent a process which the blind and the seeing man might equally share. It is to be noticed that the space suggested to the imagination when the joint moves, and projected to the distance of the finger-tip, is not represented as any specific skin-tract. What the seeing man imagines is a visible path; what the blind man imagines is rather a generic image, an abstraction from many skin-spaces whose local signs have neutralized each other, and left nothing but their common vastness behind. We shall see as we go on that this generic abstraction of space-magnitude from the various local peculiarities of feeling which accompanied it when it was for the first time felt, occurs on a considerable scale in the acquired perceptions of blind as well as of seeing men.