It was a rare event when King Francis I picked up the brush that Leonardo da Vinci had dropped. Let me begin with some words of the author. On pages 289-292, French discusses verbal and visual thought as it impinges on technological design and design education. Since it is my present purpose to let down this rather overblown prestige, let us call the characteristic verbalizing man, homo jabber. But it is at least a tenable argument that the highest forms of thought are not verbal at all, or, at least only insignificantly verbal.
Recognition is possible in the presence of a fair amount of geometric distortion or of noise.
Vision is closely linked with the sense of touch and the motor nerves and, indeed, with a human's whole self-perceiving system, and that, in turn, is related to the ability to anticipate, to imagine something happening before it does. The above mentioned elements are, in my case, of visual, and some of muscular type. Winding up this section of his book, French writes, Both verbal and visual thinking . . . are important, but there is no case for saying that verbal thinking is of a higher order. Nevertheless, homo jabber, the pedagogue, the politician, the preacher, the bureaucrat, the grammatician, the lawyer thinks he is no end of a fellow, and looks down on humble homo faber, the engineer and the designer. Unfortunately, this snobbery is rampant in the schools and so is reflected in the attitudes of pupils to the subjects taught there.