INERTIA AS RELATED TO CONSCIOUSNESS 97 



paper to us, and the expression " thirty or fewer " 

 is used, nine out of ten persons will read, " thirty or 

 forty " before they notice their mistake. Oliver 

 Wendell Holmes alleges that not one in ten people 

 can read " Judges xv. 16 " correctly ; the verse 

 is, " And Samson said, With the jaw-bone of 

 an ass heaps upon heaps, with the jaw of an ass 

 have I slain a thousand men ; " nearly every one 

 reads " jaw-bone " for " jaw " in the second clause. 

 But examples could be indefinitely multiplied, for 

 mental inertia must be as universal as mental 

 affectability. Do not bigotry and fanaticism come 

 under the categories of mental inertia of rest and 

 inertia of movement respectively ? Are not super- 

 stition and an unenlightened dislike to change 

 cases of inertia of psychic rest ? A volatile nature 

 is one with but slight psychic momentum, a dogged 

 temperament is one with much. The great obstinacy 

 of the uncultured, and the fixed delusion of the 

 monomaniac are cases of abnormally great psychic 

 inertia of rest. 



In the child-mind we have high affectability 

 and little inertia ; we all know how impressionable 

 the child is, and how extremely prone to imitate : 

 there is so little inertia of position belonging to the 

 idea in possession of the mind that it can easily be 

 supplanted by a new idea which has so little momen- 

 tum that it can readily be turned out of its course 

 by " some new thing." I find that both Faraday 

 and I have included habit as due to inertia ; the 

 longer the habit has existed the less will it have of 



7 



