PSYCHOMETRIC FACTS. 77s 



recollected are by no means atomic elements of thought ; on the con- 

 trary, they are frequently glimpses over whole provinces of mental ex- 

 periences 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 live 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 75 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 re- 

 currence 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 travelers in wild 

 countries. I have had numerous occasions, owing to a long and inti- 

 mate connection with the Geographical Society, of familiarizing myself 

 with these editions. Letters are in the first instance received from the 

 traveler while still pursuing his journey ; then some colonial newspaper 

 records his first public accounts of it on his reentry into civilized 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. (I 

 myself went through all this, more than a quarter of a century ago, on 

 returning from southwest Africa, and was quite as guilty of the fault 

 as any one 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 traveler with a practically inexhaustible collection of 

 thoughts and tableaus ; but no, the recollections tend to group them- 

 selves 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 



