SOME SENSE DEFECTS PSYCHOLOGICALLY CONSIDERED. 549 



a normal person listenintr to a murnun- of conversation Jnst 

 beyond his range, or like a man in a far corner trying to hear 

 a speaker whose voice does not fill the hall. In the former 

 case, everybody knows how without attention nothing is heard ; 

 hard listening will give a word here and there ; if the topic is 

 known, the drift can be followed; if the person's own name is 

 mentioned, he is at once aroused even if he had not been 

 listening. In other words, the difference lietween hearing and 

 not hearing depends on the attention, the knowledge, the skill in 

 guessing, the familiarity which the listener can bring to bear 

 on the sounds. He will also be helped if he can see the expres- 

 sions and gestures of the interlocutors. In the other case, the 

 want of audibility is usually the speaker's fault. Actors can 

 make a large audience hear a stage-whisper. It is not shouting, 

 but clear articulation that is wanted. In this, as in many other 

 respects, otu" King George gives good example to his ])eople. 

 When he was here as Duke of Cornwall and York, and we 

 made him Chancellor of the University, I had an opportunity of 

 judging. Sir T. Muir, then Vice-Chancellor, is an incisive 

 speaker, and 1 heard about three-quarters of his words, and was 

 able to infer all the rest; but when the Duke spoke, there was no 

 need of inference; every syllable was clear-cut, and I could have 

 heard him even at a much greater distance. But the worst fault 

 speakers have — and onh- a deaf man knows how common and 

 how annoying it is- — is putting emphasis on the wrong ])lace. It 

 is like a journalist scoring unimportant phrases for printing in 

 large type. To this is added a still more deplorable habit, equally 

 common, of trailing oft the voice and sinking it at the end of a 

 sentence, as if there was not energ)^ enough to go round. Of 

 many a speech I have to listen to, this is all that reaches me: — - 

 " Now, sir, . . . not that .... But, still .... I 

 don't say .... And here is one point I wish to draw special 



attention to Mumble, mumble, mumble . . ." If the "Z'is 



viva of the voice were put into the really important words, and 

 the energy sustained at the close of the sentence, it would be a 

 great boon to those hard of hearing. 



The deaf man has to make rapid inferences from expectation 

 and familiarity. Everybody, I believe. " hears "' largely by these 

 means — as can be seen from the difllculty a normal ^lerson has 

 in catching proper names over the telephone — as soon as infer- 

 ence is impossible, he hears worse. The intellect plays a much 

 larger part in sensation than the psychological text-books seem 

 to admit. It is this fact which makes the hearing of a deaf man 

 such a puzzle to most people. I had a friend of very varied 

 interests, who was quite acrobatic in his changes of subject. He 

 used to say to me, " I can't make you out. You seem to hear 

 all right for a while, then suddenly you become hopeless " — the 

 fact being that he had made one of his jumps without warning 

 me, and I was bewildered Ity trying to fit a tirade on the wool- 

 question into a theory of Egyptian Art. Once, travelling 



