PSYCHOMETRIC FACTS.

THERE lies before every man by day and by night, at home and abroad, an immense field for curious investigations in the operations of his own mind.

No one can have a just idea, before he has carefully experimented upon himself, of the crowd of unheeded half-thoughts and faint imagery that flits through his brain, and of the influence they exert upon his conscious life. I will describe a few of the results of my own self-examination in respect to associated ideas.

It was after many minor trials that one afternoon I felt myself in a humour for the peculiar and somewhat severe mental effort that was required to carry through a sufficiently prolonged experiment as follows. I occupied myself during a walk from the Athenæum Club, along Pall Mall to St. James's Street, a distance of some 450 yards, in keeping a half-glance on what went on in my mind, as I looked with intent scrutiny at the successive objects that caught my eye. The instant each new idea arose, it was absolutely dismissed, and another was allowed to occupy its place. I never permitted my mind to ramble into any bye-paths, but strictly limited its work to the formation of nascent ideas in association with the several objects that I saw. The ideas were, therefore, too fleeting to leave more than vague impressions in my memory. Nevertheless, I retained enough of what had taken place to be amazed at the amount of work my brain had performed. I was aware that my mind had travelled, during that brief walk, in the most discursive manner throughout the experiences of my whole life; that it had entered as an habitual guest into numberless localities that it had certainly never visited under the light of full consciousness for many years; and, in short, I inferred that my everyday brain work was incomparably more active, and that my ideas travelled far wider afield, than I had previously any distinct conception of.

My desire became intensely stimulated to try further experiments, and, as a first commencement of them, to repeat the walk under similar circumstances. I purposely allowed a few days to elapse before doing so, during which I resolutely refused to allow my thoughts to revert to what had taken place, in order that I might undergo the repetition

of the trial with as fresh a mind as possible. Again I took the walk, and again I was aware of the vast number of extremely faint thoughts that had arisen; but I was surprised and somewhat humiliated to find that a large proportion of them were identical with those that had occurred on the previous occasion. I was satisfied that their recurrence had in only a very few cases been due to mere recollection. They seemed for the most part to be founded on associations so long and firmly established, that their recurrence might be expected in a future trial, when these past experiments should have wholly disappeared from the memory.

It now became my object to seize upon these fleeting ideas before they had wholly escaped, to record and analyse them, and so to obtain a definite knowledge of their character and of the frequency of their recurrence, and such other collateral information as the experiments might afford.

The plan I adopted was to suddenly display a printed word, to allow about a couple of ideas to successively present themselves, and then, by a violent mental revulsion and sudden awakening of attention, to seize upon those ideas before they had faded, and to record them exactly as they were at the moment when they were surprised and grappled with. It was an attempt like that of Menelaus, in the Odyssey, to constrain the elusive form of Proteus. The experiment. admits of being conducted with perfect fairness. The mind can be brought into a quiescent state, blank, but intent; the word can be displayed without disturbing that state; the ideas will then present themselves naturally, and the sudden revulsion follows almost automatically. Though I say it is perfectly possible to do all this, I must in fairness add that it is the most fatiguing and distasteful mental experience that I have ever undergone. Its irksomeness arises from several independent causes. The chief of these is the endeavour to vivify an impression that is only just felt, and to drag it out from obscurity into the full light of consciousness. The exertion is akin to that of trying to recall a name that just, and only just, escapes us; it sometimes seems as though the brain would break down if the effort were persevered in, and there is a sense of immense relief when we are content to abandon the search, and to await the chance of the name occurring to us of its own accord through some accidental association. Additional exertion and much resolution are required, in carrying on the experiments, to maintain the form of the ideas strictly unaltered while they are vivified, as they have a strong tendency to a rapid growth, both in definition and completeness.

It is important, in this as in all similar cases, to describe in detail the way in which the experiments were conducted. I procured a short vocabulary of words, and laid it open by my side. I then put a book upon it in such a way that it did not cover the word that was about to be displayed, though its edge hid it from my view when I sat

a little backwards in my chair. By leaning forward the word came into sight. I also took many petty precautions, not worth describing, to prevent any other object besides the word catching my attention and distracting the thoughts. Before I began the experiment, I put myself into an easy position, with a pen in my right hand resting on a memorandum book, and with a watch that marked quarter seconds in my left hand, which was started by pressing on a stop, and continued going until the pressure was released. This was a little contrivance of my own appended to one of Benson's common chronographs. When I felt myself perfectly in repose, with my mind blank, but intent, I gently leant forward and read the word, simultaneously pressing the stop of the watch. Then I allowed about a couple of ideas to present themselves, and immediately afterwards released the stop and gave my utmost power of attention to appreciate with accuracy what had taken place, and this I recorded at once. Lastly, I wrote down at leisure the word that had been displayed, and the time shown by the chronograph to have been occupied by the experiment.

The number of words used in the experiments I am about to describe is seventy-five. I had intended it to be one hundred for the convenience of writing down percentages; but my original list became reduced by mislaying papers and other misadventures not necessary to explain. The result was that I procured a list of seventy-five words, which had been gone through as described, on four separate occasions, at intervals of about a month. Every precaution was used to prevent the recollection of what had taken place before from exercising any notable influence. It was not difficult to succeed in doing so, because the method of proceeding is permeated by the principle of completely discharging from the mind the topics on which it had previously been engaged.

I am particularly anxious that the fairness of the experiments should be subject to no undue doubt, and will therefore add yet a few more words about it. It may be thought an impossible feat to keep the mind as free and placid as I have described during the first part of the experiment, when the great change of its attitude in the second part was imminent. Nevertheless, it was quite practicable to do so. The preoccupation of my thoughts was confined to a very easy task, viz., to govern the duration of the experiment. We have abundant evidence of the facility of this sort of operation. We all of us have frequent occasion to enter heart and soul into some matter of business or earnest thought, knowing that we have but perhaps five minutes' leisure to attend to it, and that we must then break off on account of some other engagement. Nay, we even go to sleep, intending to awake earlier or later than usual, and we do it. In the present case, after about two ideas had successively arisen, I succeeded, almost as a matter of routine, in lifting my finger from the spring stop, and that little act was perhaps of some assistance in

helping me to rouse my consciousness with the sudden start that I desired.

Now for the results. I found, after displaying each word, that some little time elapsed before I took it in, chiefly because the process had been performed so quietly. If the word had been flashed. upon a dark background in large and brilliant letters, or if some one had spoken it in an abrupt, incisive tone, I am sure that period would have been considerably shortened. Again, whenever we read a single substantive without any context or qualifying adjective, its meaning is too general to admit of our forming quickly any appropriate conception of it. We have no practice in doing so in ordinary reading or conversation, where we deal with phrases in block, and not with separate words. Hence the working of the mind is far less rapid in the experiments I am describing, than on common occasions, but not much less than it was in my walk along Pall Mall.

I found the average interval that elapsed between displaying the word, and the formation of two successive ideas associated with it, to be a little less than two and a quarter seconds-say at the rate of fifty in a minute or three thousand in an hour. These ideas, it must be recollected, are by no means atomic elements of thought; on the contrary, they are frequently glimpses over whole provinces of mental experiences and into the openings of far vistas of associations, that we know to be familiar to us, though the mind does not at the moment consciously travel down any part of them. Think what even three thousand such ideas would imply if they were all different. A man's autobiography, in two large volumes of five hundred pages each, would not hold them, for no biography contains, on an average, three such sequences of incident and feeling in a page. There must therefore be, of a necessity, frequent recurrences of the same thought; and this fact was brought out quite as prominently by these experiments as by my walks along Pall Mall. They were also elicited in a form in which I could submit them to measurement.

The seventy-five words gone through on four successive occasions made a total of 300 separate trials, and gave rise between them to 505 ideas in the space of 660 seconds. There were, however, so many cases of recurrence that the number of different ideas proved to be only 279. Twenty-nine of the words gave rise to the same thought in every one of the four trials, thirty-six to the same thought in three out of the four trials, fifty-seven to two out of the four, and there were only one hundred and sixty-seven ideas that occurred no more than once. Thus we see how great is the tendency to the recurrence of the same ideas. It is conspicuous in the reiteration of anecdotes by old people, but it pervades all periods of life to a greater extent than is commonly understood, the mind habitually rambling along the same trite paths. I have been much struck by this fact in the successive editions, so to speak, of the narratives of

explorers and travellers in wild countries. I have had numerous occasions, owing to a long and intimate connection with the Geographical Society, of familiarising myself with these editions. Letters are in the first instance received from the traveller while still pursuing his journey; then some colonial newspaper records his first public accounts of it on his re-entry into civilised lands; then we hear his tale from his own lips, in conversation in England; then comes his memoir read before the society; then numerous public speeches, and lastly his book. I am almost invariably struck by the sameness of expression and anecdote in all these performances. (F myself went through all this, more than a quarter of a century ago, on returning from South-West Africa, and was quite as guilty of the fault as anyone else.) Now one would expect that a couple of years or more spent in strange lands among strange people would have filled the mind of the traveller with a practically inexhaustible collection of thoughts and tableaux; but no, the recollections tend to group themselves into a comparatively small number of separate compositions or episodes, and whatever does not fit artistically into these is neglected and finally dropped. We recollect very few of the incidents in our youth, though perhaps in old age we shall think very frequently of that little. Let any man try to write his autobiography, say between the ages of five and six, and he will find that he has exhausted everything he can recollect of that period in a very few pages. Let him meet, for the first time after very many years, with some friend of his boyhood, and talk over some interesting event in which they were both engaged, and of which his recollection is so vivid that he believes he can have forgotten none of its incidents. He will assuredly find, if his experience at all resembles my own, that he and his friend have retained very different versions of the same occurrence, that in each case persons who had played an important part in it had wholly dropped from the memory, and that the conversation will have recalled many facts to both the speakers, that had almost passed into oblivion. We recollect the memories of incidents, or the memories of those memories, rather than the incidents themselves; and the original impression, like the original anecdote in the well-known game of Russian scandal,' receives successive modifications at each step until it is strangely condensed and transformed.

I divided such part of the 279 different ideas as admitted of it into groups, according to the period of my life when the association that linked the idea to the word was first formed, and found that almost exactly the half of those that recurred either twice, thrice, or four times, dated back to the period when I had not yet left college, at the age of twenty-two. Of those that did not recur in any of the trials the proportion that dated previously to the age of twentytwo to those of later date was a little smaller, viz., as three to