612 SECTIONAL TRANSACTIONS.— J, K. 



unity and spatial and temporal ' distance ' were less potent. Errors occurred more 

 frequently where adjectives and adverbs were used than where nouns and verbs were 

 used. 



Since errors emerge from the normal workings of the mind, we cannot hope to 

 develop the art of eliminating them. Nevertheless some remedial measures, which 

 would decrease their frequency, are possible. They are : 



(a) Effort to strengthen those relations which are likely to suSer most by con- 

 vergence and confluence. 



(6) Periodic repetition of knowledge which should be exact ; such repetition will 

 counteract the effects of convergence. 



(c) Inhibition of associated intruders, to allow the noegenetic powers of the mind 

 to apprehend the relevant facts, educe the most significant relations between those 

 facts, and produce the required correlates. 



Afternoon. 

 Visit to Engineering Works of Messrs. Mavor and Coulson. 



Dr. H. D. J. White. — An Enquiry into the Discrepancies between Mental 

 Tests and Examination Tests of University Students. 



Miss M. Drummond. — A Theory of Infantile Experience. 



That increasing importance is being attached to infantile experience as a factor 

 in the formation of personality is shown by the attention devoted to it by the Freudian 

 School, by the Gestalt School, and others. At birth the infant enters a world of 

 persons and of objects. His instinctive interest is drawn first to the former, but at 

 a very early age he feels the distinctively human need to introduce unity and coherence 

 into the latter. The insistence of the followers of Freud on the pleasure principle as 

 the key to the child's early attitude to the world leads them almost entirely to neglect 

 the intellectual aspect of the child's development. In the course of his realisation of 

 the laws of time, space and matter the infant forms theories which are in themselves 

 plausible, although to us because of our long experience they often seem absurd. 

 These theories are implicit in the child's early experimentation, and must be looked 

 for there. Some of these scientific hypotheses are less easily dropped than others 

 because they gratify the sense of power. Rational appreciation of facts is thus 

 delayed, sometimes for many years, by the working of the pleasure principle. It is 

 the child's ignorance that renders theories satisfactory to him which are not only 

 unsatisfactory but inconceivable to us — inconceivable, that is, as living hypotheses. 

 If we allow for his ignorance we see that his intelligence works along the same lines 

 as our own. Close parallels to his thinking are to be found in the thinking of primitive 

 man, e.g. attitude to pictures, to places, to life. The child's experience is radically 

 different from ours ; his theories, therefore, are different, and consequently his reality. 

 As the race in its progress towards the scientific standpoint has had to work through 

 and abandon theory after theory, so also has the child. 



Miss M. D. Vernon. — An Experimental Study of Eye-movements, 

 particularly in relation to Reading. 



SECTION K.— BOTANY. 



(For reference to the publication elsewhere of communications entered in the 

 following list of transactions, see p. 687.) 



Thursday, September 6. 



Presidential Address by Prof. Dame Helen Gwynne-Vaughan, 

 i 5 ., oi S;3 and Nutrition in the Fungi. (See p. 185.) 



