ASSO CIA Tl ON. 557 



never hear the name without the faint arousal of the image 

 of the object.* 



THE RAPIDITY OF ASSOCIATION. 



Reading exemplifies this kind of cohesion even more 

 beautifully. It is an uninterrupted and protracted recall 

 of sounds by sights which have always been coujjled with 

 them in the past. I find that I can name six hundred let- 

 ters in two minutes on a printed page. Five distinct acts 

 of association between sight and sound (not to speak of all 

 the other processes concerned) must then have occurred in 

 each second in my mind. In reading entire words the speed 

 is much more rapid. Valentin relates in his Physiology 

 that the reading of a single page of the proof, containing 

 2629 letters, took him 1 minute and 32 seconds. In this 

 experiment each letter was understood in ^^ of a second, 

 but owing to the integration of letters into entire words, 

 forming each a single aggregate impression directly associ- 

 ated with a single acoustic image, we need not suppose as 

 many as 28 separate associations in a sound. The figures, 

 however, suffice to show with what extreme rapidity an 

 actual sensation recalls its customary associates. Both in 

 fact seem to our ordinary attention to come into the mind 

 at once. 



The time-measuring psychologists of recent days have 

 tried their hand at this problem by more elaborate methods. 

 Galton, using a very simple apparatus, found that the sight 

 of an unforeseen word would awaken an associated ' idea ' 

 in about | of a second, t Wundt next made determinations 



* Unless the name belong to a rapidly uttered sentence, when no sub- 

 stantive image may have time to arise. 



f In his observations he saj^s that time was lost in mentally taking in 

 the word which was the cue, " owing to the quiet unobtrusive way in 

 which I found it necessary to bring it into view, so as not to distract the 

 thoughts Moreover, a substantive standing by itself is usually the equiv- 

 alent of too abstract an idea for us to conceive properly without delay. 

 Thus it is very difficult to get a quick conception of the word 'carriage,' 

 because there are so many different kinds— two-wheeled, four-wheeled, 

 open and closed, and in so many different possible positions, that the mind 

 possibly hesitates amidst an obscure sense of many alternations that cannot 

 blend together. But limit the idea to say a landau, and the mental asso- 

 ciation declares itself more quickly." (Inquiries, etc., p. 190.) 



