If the argument is accepted as essentially sound up to this point, it remains for us to consider whether the patient's difficulties in orienting himself spatially and in locating objects in space with the sense of touch can be explained by his defective visual condition. But before we can do this, we must first find answers to our original questions 1 and 2; then we shall perhaps be in a position to provide something like a complete answer to the question at hand.

In what ways, then, did the patient's psychical blindness manifest itself? He could not see objects as unified, self-contained, and organized figures, as a person does with normal vision. The meaning of this, as we shall see, is that he had no fund of visual memory-images of objects as objects; and, therefore, he could not recognize even long-familiar things upon seeing them again. Instead, he constantly became lost in parts and components of them, confused some of their details with those of neighboring objects, and so on, unless he allowed time to ``trace'' the object in question through minute movements of the head and hands and in this way to discover its contours. According to his own testimony, he never actually saw things as shaped but only as generally amorphous ``blots'' of color of a more or less indefinite size; at their edges they slipped pretty much out of focus altogether. But by the tracing procedure, he could, in a strange obviously kinesthetic manner, find the unseen form; could piece, as it were, the jumbled mass together into an organized whole and then recognize it as a man or a triangle or whatever it turned out to be. If, however, the figure to be discerned were complicated, composed of several interlocking subfigures, and so on, even the tracing process failed him, and he could not focus even relatively simple shapes among its parts. This meant, concretely, that the patient could not read at all without making writing like movements of the head or body, became easily confused by ``hasher marks'' inserted between hand-written words and thus confused the mark for one of the letters, and could recognize a simple straight line or a curved one only by tracing it.