As one would surmise, the procedure, however, could be repeated with the same object or with the same type of object often enough, so that the corresponding visual blots and the merest beginning of the tracing movement would provide clues as to the actual shape, which the patient then immediately could determine by a kind of inference. Men, trees, automobiles, houses, and so on -- objects continually confronted in everyday life -- had each its characteristic blot appearance and became easily recognizable, at the very beginning of tracing, by an inference as to what each was. Dice, for example, he inferred from black dots on a white surface. He evidently could not actually see the corners of these objects, but their size and the dots gave them away. And the authors give numerous instances of calculated guessing on the patient's part to show how large a role it played in his process of readapting himself and how proficient he became at it. Often he seems even to have been able to guess correctly, without the tracing motions, solely on the basis of qualitative differences among the blot like things which appeared in his visual experience.

Perhaps the very important question -- What is, then, exactly the role of kinesthetic sensations in the patient's ability to recognize forms and shapes by means of the tracing movements when he is actually looking at things? - has now been raised in the reader's mind and in the following form. If the patient can perceive figure kinesthetically when he cannot perceive it visually, then, it would seem, the sense of touch has immediate contact with the spatial aspects of things in independence of visual representations, at least in regard to two dimensions, and, as we shall see, even this much spatial awareness on the part of unaided touch is denied by the authors. How, then, do the kinesthetic sensations function in all this? The authors set about answering this fundamental question through a detailed investigation of the patient's ability, tactually, (1) to perceive figure and (2) to locate objects in space, with his eyes closed (or turned away from the object concerned). Quite naturally, they make the investigation, first, by prohibiting the patient from making any movements at all and then, later, by repeating it and allowing the patient to move in any way he wanted to.