It has been remarked above that certain hallucinations of the insane have their perfect analogue in the reproductive power of sense-impressions. We can reproduce in the mind any object which we have often seen. This power is developed in very different grades in different persons. Usually the reproduced image is decidedly weaker than its original, both in its outlines and in its colour. In rare cases we find the reproductive power so much heightened that the reproduced image is almost equal to the original percept. Thus Lombroso * reports of a painter that “ he was able to sketch as many as three hundred portraits a year. He only needed to look at a person attentively for half an hour, and after that could call up a hallucinatory vision of him which he would proceed to copy in painting with as much distinctness and confidence as if he were looking at a real person.” This case is nothing but an intensification of a healthy action, much to the advantage of the artist concerned. It is certainly offensive to call such a gift by the name of hallucination. That, however, is a mere question of the usage of language. At any rate, such a phenomenon ought not to be confounded with insane hallucinations, for in the painter the action was under his control. He called up the “ hallucination,” if you will call it so, when it served his purpose to do so, and dismissed it when it had served his turn. The hallucinations which torment and affright persons of diseased minds arise spontaneously and will not go at the patient’s bidding.

Meantime it is very doubtful whether the artist’s recollected image was really as distinct and definite as the original percept. To determine that would require evidence of a widely different kind from the report of the writer Ball, who was Lombroso’s informant. The fact that the painter was able to distinguish the recollected image from an object of direct visual perception, and did not mistake the face recollected for a face really there, would seem to show that his image differed from a perceived image somewhat in the same manner as do the recollections of ordinary people. But however that may be, such a phenomenon is certainly in no wise a morbid symptom.

Goethe describes the same faculty in himself. “My sensuous, apprehensive power is of so unusual a sort that I retain all outlines and forms most sharply in my memory; but I am moved in the most lively way by misshapen and defective forms. . . . Without that capacity for sharp apprehension and impression I could not have produced my characters so vividly and sharply individualized. This distinctness and precision led me, for many years, to entertain the delusion that I possessed a vocation and talent for drawing and painting.”