When we attempt to trace the first steps in each operation o_Inquiries into human faculty and its development

minds, we are usually baulked by the difficulty of keeping watch,

without embarrassing the freedom of its action. The difficulty is

much more than the common and well-known one of attending to two

things at once. It is especially due to the fact that the elementary

operations of the mind are exceedingly faint and evanescent, and

that it requires the utmost painstaking to watch them properly. It

would seem impossible to give the required attention to the

processes of thought, and yet to think as freely as if the mind had

been in no way preoccupied. The peculiarity of the experiments I am

about to describe is that I have succeeded in evading this difficulty.

My method consists in allowing the mind to play freely for a very

brief period, until a couple or so of ideas have passed through it,

and then, while the traces or echoes of those ideas are still

lingering in the brain, to turn the attention upon them with a

sudden and complete awakening; to arrest, to scrutinise them, and to

record their exact appearance. Afterwards I collate the records at

leisure, and discuss them, and draw conclusions. It must be

understood that the second of the two ideas was never derived from

the first, but always directly from the original object. This was

ensured by absolutely withstanding all temptation to reverie. I do

not mean that the first idea was of necessity a simple elementary

thought; sometimes it was a glance down a familiar line of

associations, sometimes it was a well-remembered mental attitude or

mode of feeling, but I mean that it was never so far indulged in as

to displace the object that had suggested it from being the primary

topic of attention.

I must add, that I found the experiments to be extremely trying and

irksome, and that it required much resolution to go through with them,

using the scrupulous care they demanded. Nevertheless the results

well repaid the trouble. They gave me an interesting and unexpected

view of the number of the operations of the mind, and of the obscure

depths in which they took place, of which I had been little

conscious before. The general impression they have left upon me is

like that which many of us have experienced when the basement of our

house happens to be under thorough sanitary repairs, and we realise

for the first time the complex system of drains and gas and water

pipes, flues, bell-wires, and so forth, upon which our comfort

depends, but which are usually hidden out of sight, and with whose

existence, so long as they acted well, we had never troubled

ourselves.

The first experiments I made were imperfect, but sufficient to

inspire me with keen interest in the matter, and suggested the form

of procedure that I have already partly described. My first

experiments were these. On several occasions, but notably on one

when I felt myself unusually capable of the kind of effort required,

I walked leisurely along Pall Mall, a distance of 450 yards, during

which time I scrutinised with attention every successive object that

caught my eyes, and I allowed my attention to rest on it until one

or two thoughts had arisen through direct association with that

object; then I took very brief mental note of them, and passed on to

the next object. I never allowed my mind to ramble. The number of

objects viewed was, I think, about 300, for I had subsequently

repeated the same walk under similar conditions and endeavoured to

estimate their number, with that result. It was impossible for me to

recall in other than the vaguest way the numerous ideas that had

passed through my mind; but of this, at least, I am sure, that

samples of my whole life had passed before me, that many bygone

incidents, which I never suspected to have formed part of my stock

of thoughts, had been glanced at as objects too familiar to awaken

the attention. I saw at once that the brain was vastly more active

than I had previously believed it to be, and I was perfectly amazed

at the unexpected width of the field of its everyday operations.

After an interval of some days, during which I kept my mind from

dwelling on my first experiences, in order that it might retain as

much freshness as possible for a second experiment, I repeated the

walk, and was struck just as much as before by the variety of the

ideas that presented themselves, and the number of events to which

they referred, about which I had never consciously occupied myself

of late years. But my admiration at the activity of the mind was

seriously diminished by another observation which I then made, namely,

that there had been a very great deal of repetition of thought. The

actors in my mental stage were indeed very numerous, but by no means

so numerous as I had imagined. They now seemed to be something like

the actors in theatres where large processions are represented, who

march off one side of the stage, and, going round by the back, come

on again at the other. I accordingly cast about for means of laying

hold of these fleeting thoughts, and, submitting them to statistical

analysis, to find out more about their tendency to repetition and

other matters, and the method I finally adopted was the one already

mentioned. I selected a list of suitable words, and wrote them on

different small sheets of paper. Taking care to dismiss them from my

thoughts when not engaged upon them, and allowing some days to

elapse before I began to use them, I laid one of these sheets with

all due precautions, under a book, but not wholly covered by it, so

that when I leaned forward I could see one of the words, being

previously quite ignorant of what the word would be. Also I held a

small chronograph, which I started by pressing a spring the moment

the word caught my eye, and which stopped of itself the instant I

released the spring; and this I did so soon as about a couple of

ideas in direct association with the word had arisen in my mind. I

found that I could not manage to recollect more than two ideas with

the needed precision, at least not in a general way; but sometimes

several ideas occurred so nearly together that I was able to record

three or even four of them, while sometimes I only managed one. The

second ideas were, as I have already said, never derived from the

first, but always direct from the word itself, for I kept my

attention firmly fixed on the word, and the associated ideas were

seen only by a half glance. When the two ideas had occurred,

I stopped the chronograph and wrote them down, and the time they

occupied. I soon got into the way of doing all this in a very

methodical and automatic manner, keeping the mind perfectly calm and

neutral, but intent and, as it were, at full cock and on hair trigger,

before displaying the word. There was no disturbance occasioned by

thinking of the forthcoming revulsion of the mind the moment before

the chronograph was stopped. My feeling before stopping it was

simply that I had delayed long enough, and this in no way interfered

with the free action of the mind. I found no trouble in ensuring the

complete fairness of the experiment, by using a number of little

precautions, hardly necessary to describe, that practice quickly

suggested, but it was a most repugnant and laborious work, and it

was only by strong self-control that I went through my schedule

according to programme. The list of words that I finally secured was

75 in number, though I began with more. I went through them on four

separate occasions, under very different circumstances, in England

and abroad, and at intervals of about a month. In no case were the

associations governed to any degree worth recording, by remembering

what had occurred to me on previous occasions, for I found that the

process itself had great influence in discharging the memory of what

it had just been engaged in, and I, of course, took care between the

experiments never to let my thoughts revert to the words. The

results seem to me to be as trustworthy as any other statistical

series that has been collected with equal care.

On throwing these results into a common statistical hotch-pot, I

first examined into the rate at which these associated ideas were

formed. It took a total time of 660 seconds to form the 505 ideas;

that is, at about the rate of 50 in a minute, or 3000 in an hour.

This would be miserably slow work in reverie, or wherever the

thought follows the lead of each association that successively

presents itself. In the present case, much time was lost in mentally

taking the word in, owing to the quiet unobtrusive way in which I

found it necessary to bring it into view, so as not to distract the

thoughts. Moreover, a substantive standing by itself is usually the

equivalent of too abstract an idea for us to conceive properly

without delay. Thus it is very difficult to get a quick conception

of the word "carriage," because there are so many different

kinds--two-wheeled, four-wheeled, open and closed, and all of them

in so many different possible positions, that the mind possibly

hesitates amidst an obscure sense of many alternatives that cannot

blend together. But limit the idea to say a laudau, and the mental

association declares itself more quickly. Say a laudau coming down

the street to opposite the door, and an image of many blended

laudaus that have done so forms itself without the least hesitation.

Next, I found that my list of 75 words gone over 4 times, had given

rise to 505 ideas and 13 cases of puzzle, in which nothing

sufficiently definite to note occurred within the brief maximum

period of about 4 seconds, that I allowed myself to any single trial.

Of these 505 only 289 were different The precise proportions in

which the 505 were distributed in quadruplets, triplets, doublets,

or singles, is shown in the uppermost lines of Table I. The same

facts are given under another form in the lower lines of the Table,

which show how the 289 different ideas were distributed in cases of

fourfold, treble, double, or single occurrences.

TABLE I.

RECURRENT ASSOCIATIONS.

================+=================================================+

Total Number of | |

Associations. | Occurring in |

|-------------------------------------------------+

505 | 116 | 108 | 114 | 167 |

----------------+--------------+------------+-----------+---------+

Per cent . 100 | 23 | 21 | 23 | 33 |

================+==============+============+===========+=========+

Total Number of | |

Different | Occurring |

Associations. +-------------------------------------------------+

----------------+--------------+------------+-----------+---------+

289 | 29 | 36 | 57 | 167 |

----------------+--------------+------------+-----------+---------+

Per cent . 100 | 10 | 12 | 20 | 58 |

================+==============+============+===========+=========+

I was fully prepared to find much iteration in my ideas but had

little expected that out of every hundred words twenty-three would

give rise to exactly the same association in every one of the four

trials; twenty-one to the same association in three out of the four,

and so on, the experiments having been purposely conducted under

very different conditions of time and local circumstances. This shows

much less variety in the mental stock of ideas than I had expected,

and makes us feel that the roadways of our minds are worn into very

deep ruts. I conclude from the proved number of faint and barely

conscious thoughts, and from the proved iteration of them, that the

mind is perpetually travelling over familiar ways without our memory

retaining any impression of its excursions. Its footsteps are so

light and fleeting that it is only by such experiments as I have

described that we can learn anything about them. It is apparently

always engaged in mumbling over its old stores, and if any one of

these is wholly neglected for a while, it is apt to be forgotten,

perhaps irrecoverably. It is by no means the keenness of interest

and of the attention when first observing an object, that fixes it

in the recollection. We pore over the pages of a _Bradshaw_, and

study the trains for some particular journey with the greatest

interest; but the event passes by, and the hours and other facts

which we once so eagerly considered become absolutely forgotten. So

in games of whist, and in a large number of similar instances. As I

understand it, the subject must have a continued living interest in

order to retain an abiding place in the memory. The mind must refer

to it frequently, but whether it does so consciously or

unconsciously is not perhaps a matter of much importance. Otherwise,

as a general rule, the recollection sinks, and appears to be utterly

drowned in the waters of Lethe.

The instances, according to my personal experience, are very rare,

and even those are not very satisfactory, in which some event

recalls a memory that had lain _absolutely_ dormant for many years.

In this very series of experiments a recollection which I thought

had entirely lapsed appeared under no less than three different

aspects on different occasions. It was this: when I was a boy, my

father, who was anxious that I should learn something of physical

science, which was then never taught at school, arranged with the

owner of a large chemist's shop to let me dabble at chemistry for a

few days in his laboratory. I had not thought of this fact, so far

as I was aware, for many years; but in scrutinising the fleeting

associations called up by the various words, I traced two mental

visual images (an alembic and a particular arrangement of tables and

light), and one mental sense of smell (chlorine gas) to that very

laboratory. I recognised that these images appeared familiar to me,

but I had not thought of their origin. No doubt if some strange

conjunction of circumstances had suddenly recalled those three

associations at the same time, with perhaps two or three other

collateral matters which may be still living in my memory, but which

I no not as yet identify, a mental perception of startling vividness

would be the result, and I should have falsely imagined that it had

supernaturally, as it were, started into life from an entire

oblivion extending over many years. Probably many persons would have

registered such a case as evidence that things once perceived can

never wholly vanish from the recollection, but that in the hour

of death, or under some excitement, every event of a past life

may reappear. To this view I entirely dissent. Forgetfulness

appears absolute in the vast majority of cases, and our supposed

recollections of a past life are, I believe, no more than that

of a large number of episodes in it, to be reckoned perhaps in

hundreds of thousands, but certainly not in tens of hundreds of

thousands, that have escaped oblivion. Every one of the fleeting,

half-conscious thoughts that were the subject of my experiments,

admitted of being vivified by keen attention, or by some appropriate

association, but I strongly suspect that ideas which have long since

ceased to fleet through the brain, owing to the absence of current

associations to call them up, disappear wholly. A comparison of old

memories with a newly-met friend of one's boyhood, about the events

we then witnessed together, show how much we had each of us forgotten.

Our recollections do not tally. Actors and incidents that seem to

have been of primary importance in those events to the one have been

utterly forgotten by the other. The recollection of our earlier

years are, in truth, very scanty, as any one will find who tries to

enumerate them.

My associated ideas were for the most part due to my own unshared

experiences, and the list of them would necessarily differ widely

from that which another person would draw up who might repeat my

experiments. Therefore one sees clearly, and I may say, one can see

_measurably_, how impossible it is in a general way for two

grown-up persons to lay their minds side by side together in perfect

accord. The same sentence cannot produce precisely the same effect on

both, and the first quick impressions that any given word in it may

convey, will differ widely in the two minds.

I took pains to determine as far as feasible the dates of my life at

which each of the associated ideas was first attached to the word.

There were 124 cases in which identification was satisfactory, and

they were distributed as in Table II.

TABLE II.

RELATIVE NUMBER OF ASSOCIATIONS FORMED AT DIFFERENT

PERIODS OF LIFE.

==============+==========================================+==============+

Total number | Occurring | Whose first |

of different |------------------------------------------+ formation |

+--------| +-----| +-----| +-----| +-----| |

| per | |per | |per | |per | |per | |

+--------|----+-----+----+-----+---+-----+----+-----+--------------+

48 | 39 | 12 | 10 | 11 | 9 | 9 | 7 | 16 | 13 | boyhood and |

| | | | | | | | | | |

57 | 46 | 10 | 8 | 8 | 7 | 6 | 5 | 33 | 26 | subsequent |

| | | | | | | | | | |

19 | 15 | -- | -- | 4 | 3 | 1 | 1 | 14 | 11 | quite recent |

-----+--------|----+-----+----+-----+---+-----+----+-----+--------------+

124 | 100 | 22 | 18 | 23 | 19 |16 | 13 | 63 | 50 | Totals. |

=====+========+=========================================================+

It will be seen from the Table that out of the 48 earliest

associations no less than 12, or one quarter of them, occurred in

each of the four trials; of the 57 associations first formed in

manhood, 10, or about one-sixth of them, had a similar recurrence,

but as to the 19 other associations first formed in quite recent

times, not one of them occurred in the whole of the four trials.

Hence we may see the greater fixity of the earlier associations, and

might measurably determine the decrease of fixity as the date of

their first formation becomes less remote.

The largeness of the number 33 in the middle entry of the last

column but one, which disconcerts the run of the series, is wholly

due to a visual memory of places seen in manhood. I will not speak

about this now, as I shall have to refer to it farther on. Neglecting,

for the moment, this unique class of occurrences, it will be seen

that one-half of the associations date from the period of life

before leaving college; and it may easily be imagined that many of

these refer to common events in an English education. Nay further, on

looking through the list of all the associations it was easy to see

how they are pervaded by purely English ideas, and especially such

as are prevalent in that stratum of English society in which I was

born and bred, and have subsequently lived. In illustration of this,

I may mention an anecdote of a matter which greatly impressed me at

the time. I was staying in a country house with a very pleasant

party of young and old, including persons whose education and

versatility were certainly not below the social average. One evening

we played at a round game, which consisted in each of us drawing as

absurd a scrawl as he or she could, representing some historical

event; the pictures were then shuffled and passed successively from

hand to hand, every one writing down independently their

interpretation of the picture, as to what the historical event was

that the artist intended to depict by the scrawl. I was astonished

at the sameness of our ideas. Cases like Canute and the waves, the

Babes in the Tower, and the like, were drawn by two and even three

persons at the same time, quite independently of one another,

showing how narrowly we are bound by the fetters of our early

education. If the figures in the above Table may be accepted as

fairly correct for the world generally, it shows, still in a

measurable degree, the large effect of early education in fixing our

associations. It will of course be understood that I make no absurd

profession of being able by these very few experiments to lay down

statistical constants of universal application, but that my principal

object is to show that a large class of mental phenomena, that have

hitherto been too vague to lay hold of, admit of being caught by the

firm grip of genuine statistical inquiry. The results that I have

thus far given are hotch-pot results. It is necessary to sort the

materials somewhat before saying more about them.

After several trials I found that the associated ideas admitted

of being divided into three main groups. First there is the imagined

sound of words, as in verbal quotations or names of persons. This

was frequently a mere parrot-like memory which acted instantaneously

and in a meaningless way, just as a machine might act. In the next

group there was every other kind of sense imagery; the chime of

imagined bells, the shiver of remembered cold, the scent of some

particular locality, and, much more frequently than all the rest

put together, visual imagery. The last of the three groups contains

what I will venture, for the want of a better name, to call

"histrionic" representations. It includes those cases where I either

act a part in imagination, or see in imagination a part acted, or,

most commonly by far, where I am both spectator and all the actors

at once, in an imaginary mental theatre. Thus I feel a nascent sense

of some muscular action while I simultaneously witness a puppet of

my brain--a part of myself--perform that action, and I assume a

mental attitude appropriate to the occasion. This, in my case, is a

very frequent way of generalising, indeed I rarely feel that I have

secure hold of a general idea until I have translated it somehow

into this form. Thus the word "abasement" presented itself to me, in

one of my experiments, by my mentally placing myself in a pantomimic

attitude of humiliation with half-closed eyes, bowed head, and

uplifted palms, while at the same time I was aware of myself as of a

mental puppet, in that position. This same word will serve to

illustrate the other groups also. It so happened in connection with

"abasement" that the word "David" or "King David" occurred to me on

one occasion in each of three out of the four trials; also that an

accidental misreading, or perhaps the merely punning association of

the words "a basement," brought up on all four occasions the image

of the foundations of a house that the builders had begun upon.

So much for the character of the association; next as to that of the

words. I found, after the experiments were over, that the words were

divisible into three distinct groups. The first contained "abbey,"

"aborigines," "abyss," and others that admitted of being presented

under some mental image. The second group contained "abasement,"

"abhorrence," "ablution," etc., which admitted excellently of

histrionic representation. The third group contained the more

abstract words, such as "afternoon," "ability," "abnormal," which

were variously and imperfectly dealt with by my mind. I give the

results in the upper part of Table III., and, in order to save

trouble, I have reduced them to percentages in the lower lines of

the Table.

TABLE III.

COMPARISON BETWEEN THE QUALITY OF THE WORDS AND THAT OF

THE IDEAS IN IMMEDIATE ASSOCIATION WITH THEM.

=========================================================================+

series. | | | | of | and | |

| |---------+----------+--------+-----------+------+

26 |"Abbey" series| 46 | 12 | 32 | 17 | 107 |

20 |"Abasement" " | 25 | 26 | 11 | 17 | 79 |

29 |"Afternoon" " | 23 | 27 | 16 | 38 | 104 |

75 | | | | | | 290 |

| |---------+----------+--------+-----------+------+

|"Abbey" series| 43 | 11 | 30 | 16 | 100 |

|"Abasement" " | 32 | 33 | 13 | 22 | 100 |

|"Afternoon" " | 22 | 25 | 16 | 37 | 100 |

==========================================================================

When we attempt to trace the first steps in each operation of our