DISCOVERY 



203 



alchemists and the popular ideas of to-day concerning 

 the transmutation or artificial disintegration of ele- 

 ments are in many points wrong, but they are not 

 altogether wrong. There is a germ of truth in it aU, 

 but it is truth distorted. Emphasis, for example, 

 has been put on the gold, and not on the thing many 

 times more important, the liberated energy. In radio- 

 activity we see transmutation going on among the 

 heaviest elements with liberation of relatively very 

 large quantities of energy, but as these elements are 

 among the rarest of all, the whole business is reaUy on 

 a very tiny scale only. Also it is spontaneous ; it 

 exists of itself ; we cannot accelerate it. Some of 

 the lightest elements, however, have yielded to the 

 attacks upon them, and are in fact disintegrated at the 

 will of the experimenter. But this process can be 

 carried out, from the nature of things, to a very small 

 extent only. It can be proved that the disintegration 

 is real, and that the internal energy of some atoms may 

 be tapped ; but although a beginning has been made, it 

 would at present appear unlikely that the process may 

 be so extended as to do things on what is known as a 

 commercial scale. The main thing, however, is that 

 a real beginning has been made, and the rest may be 

 very safely left to the future. 



REFERENCES 



Sir Ernest Rutherford, Journal of the Chemical Society, vol. cxxi, 

 p. 400 (1922) ; Nature for April I, 1922, p. 418. 



Vehicles and Routes of 



Thought 



By T. H. Pear, M.A., B.Sc. 



Professor of Psychology in the University of Manchester 



There are unfortunates for whom Windermere is 

 separated from Keswick by twenty miles of a first- 

 class road and fifty minutes of other people's dust. 

 For the lucky ones, there stretch between these towns 

 a hundred miles, a week or more, and ways infinitely 

 various, blessedly unclassable and consistently dustless. 

 What his route may mean to an aviator who flashes 

 over this region in ten minutes, I neither know nor 

 care. 



The relevance of this introduction lies in the fact 

 that persons whose interest is merely to transport 

 themselves from one spot to another seldom speculate 

 overmuch about alternative vehicles or routes unless 

 the former let them down or the latter become blocked. 

 But a snowstorm, a strike, or a flood will instantane- 



ously coerce their interest in both these subjects. 

 Moreover, your rock-climber, walker, motorist, and 

 aviator, in their conversations about a hilly district, 

 are clearly, from the subjective or psychological 

 point of view, discussing different and incommensurable 

 things. 



Now those peculiar processes of travel through 

 reality which we call thinking are facilitated by 

 vehicles of various kinds. Prominent among these are 

 mental images, and not, of course, visual images alone. 

 For the present purpose it will be assumed that every 

 kind of sensation we have had is capable of leaving 

 behind it the material potentiality of its revival in 

 the form of an "image," visual, auditor}-, tactual, 

 and the like. Words, which are schematic images 

 heavily charged with meaning, are the chief carriers 

 of some people's thought, and " conscious atti- 

 tudes," or Bewitsstseinslagen, the wraiths of gesture- 

 language, the timid, incipient contractions of muscles 

 which under the suns of Sicily or Los Angeles might 

 thaw out into full-blooded gestures, are the natural 

 bearers of others. In some people, a train of thought, 

 if it lasts long enough, may command all these vehicles. 



But just as travel has purposes of which carriages 

 are mere instruments, so in people's minds meanings 

 express themselves more or less successfully and com- 

 pletely through these images and bodily sensations. 

 And there are psychologists who hold that in highly 

 developed minds meaning may function in its own 

 right, that " imageless thoughts " exist ; that they are 

 not " fancies that broke through language and escaped," 

 but thoughts which, as yet untrammelled by language, 

 living in a primitive nakedness, would be cramped by 

 clothing, even if it were the lightest vestments of a 

 poet's imagery. Other psychologists, while accepting 

 the empirical data upon which this belief is founded, 

 would urge that before embracing it we should explore 

 exhaustively every aspect of the possibility that 

 these gossamer meanings are carried by suitably 

 delicate contractions of those muscle-groups sub- 

 serving speech, gesture, and emotion. 



But the last ten years have seen a fairly general 

 mobilisation of psychologists for immediately practical 

 uses. As a result, since psychologists are stiU, com- 

 paratively speaking, a small band, there has been a 

 certain aversion to this inherently challenging 

 problem of theory. We must now turn away, too, but 

 for a reason more simple, obvious, and perhaps more 

 convincing than those which have led to this deviation 

 of interest. 



The Varying Manner in which Individuals 

 Think 



The main purpose of the present article is to express 



