392 MILDRED WEST LORING 



but which are not of the level of concreteness of apple or book. 

 Such words are cost, fate, style, skill. Do we mean cosiness, 

 fatehood, styleness, skillness, or the actual money, the actual 

 happening, short skirts and high boots, and manipulation of figures? 

 Or can we say that we are ever precise at all in just what we do 

 mean, is now one meant, now the other? For this reason a new 

 classification was sought. Seven categories with an additional 

 unclassified group was the smallest number found possible to 

 use. They were chosen as follows: 



1. Inanimate objects. This class is self-explanatory. 



2. Animate objects. Here are included all nouns denoting 

 living objects in the animal kingdom. A corpse or a salt herring 

 was classified as inanimate. The noun must also denote the 

 whole organism, not just one of its parts, e.g arm and knuckle 

 come under a later category. 



8. Actions. These nouns express pure action, such as leap, 

 riding, for their existence lasts only during the leaping or riding. 

 After the leap has been leaped there is no leap left. This was 

 taken as the test for this class. There are a good many nouns 

 which may express either pure action or the result of the action. 

 The adjective given by the subject was taken as criterion of 

 which interpretation has been made by the subject, and it was 

 so classified. If ambiguous, it was relegated to the unclassi- 

 fied group. Such an example of possible double meaning is the 

 noun crack. This may mean the actual space in the side of the 

 broken object, as in the reaction jagged-crack, or it may mean 

 the action of cracking itself as in the reaction sudden-crack. The 

 former and others of its kind were classified as inanimate objects. 



4. Vegetable kingdom. This class is self-explanatory. 



5. Parts of the body. This class is self-explanatory. It was 

 of course not possible to list them under animate objects with 

 words denoting a complete organism. Besides it was thought 

 that a separate classification of these might through a possible 

 increased reaction time throw some light on the emot'onal 

 reaction, inasmuch as many parts of the body are of especial 

 -erotic significance. 



