THE EMOTIONAL LANGUAGE OF THE FUTURE. 319 



reached, so that the professor states that " the duration of the first 

 act of the electrical discharge is in certain cases only forty billionths 

 of a second, an interval of time just sufficient to enable a ray of light 

 to travel over forty feet." The duration was twenty-five times 

 smaller than had ever before been measured. In this infinitesimal por- 

 tion of time a strong and distinct impression upon the retina is made, 

 so that " the letters on a printed page are plainly to be seen ; also, if a 

 polariscope be used, the cross and rings around the axis of crystals can 

 be observed with all their peculiarities." Nor is this all ; " as the ob- 

 literation of the micrometric lines could only take place from the cir- 

 cumstance that the retina retains and combines a whole series of impres- 

 sions whose joint duration is forty billionths of a second, it follows 

 that a much smaller interval of time will suffice for vision. If we 

 limit the number of views of the lines presented to the eye in a single 

 case to ten, it would result that four billionths of a second is sufficient 

 for human vision." 



We saw at the outset how much an act of vision involves, and we 

 have now some idea of how long it takes. If the discharge of the 

 thunder-cloud occupies, as was stated, the one five-hundredth of a 

 second, the " interviews " of our philosopher with the " amber-spirit " 

 were at least fifty thousand times " quicker than lightning." 



-»♦♦• 



THE EMOTIONAL LANGUAGE OF THE FUTURE. 



MR. SPENCER recently called the attention, in a very interesting 

 passage of his " Psychology," to those secondary signs of a feel- 

 ing which are to be found in abortive attempts to conceal it. " A 

 state of mauvaise honte" he well says, fi otherwise tolerably well con- 

 cealed, is indicated by an obvious difficulty in finding fit positions for 

 the hands." A great mental agitation, though prevented from break- 

 ing out into violent expression, is pretty certain to betray itself in the 

 awkward, shuffling movements which are made to curb and suppress 

 it. Such indirect signs of emotion Mr. Spencer calls its secondary 

 natural language. 



The fact that many of our emotions now betray themselves only 

 through the incompleteness of the effort of will to disguise them is not 

 a little curious, and offers several lines of interesting inquiry. It at 

 once suggests how very little play for emotional expression the con- 

 ditions of modern society appear to allow. For it seems tolerably 

 certain that the voluntary hiding of feeling is a late attainment in 

 human development, and is forced on us simply by the needs of ad- 

 vancing civilization. Savages, for the most part, know little of con- 

 cealing their passions, and this makes them so good a psychological 



