774 THE POPULAR SCIU.VCE MONTHLY. 



scribe is seventy-five. I had intended it to be one hundred for the con- 

 venience 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 m}' 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' lei- 

 sure 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 successfully arisen, I succeeded, almost as a matter 

 of routii:e, in lifting my finger from the spring-stop, and that little act 

 was perhaps of some assistance in helping me to rouse my conscious- 

 ness 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 con- 

 siderably 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 de- 

 scribing 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 



