galton.org 145
Psychometric Experiments
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than the power of quickly seizing and easily manipulating ideas of a very
abstract nature. Commonly we grasp them very imperfectly, and cling to
their skirts with great difficulty.
In comparing the order in which the ideas presented themselves, I find
that a decided precedence is assumed by the histrionic ideas, wherever
they occur; that verbal associations occur first and with great quickness on
many occasions, but on the whole that they are only a little more likely to
occur first than second; and that imagery is decidedly more likely to be
the second than the first of the associations called up by a word. In short,
gesture-language appeals the most quickly to my feelings.
It would be very instructive to print the actual records at length, made
by many experimenters, if the records could be clubbed together and
thrown into a statistical form; but it would be too absurd to print one’s
own singly. They lay bare the foundations of a man’s thoughts with
curious distinctness, and exhibit his mental anatomy with more vividness
and truth than he Would probably care to publish to the world.
It remains to summarise what has been said in the foregoing memoir. I
have desired to show how whole strata of mental operations that have
lapsed out of ordinary consciousness, admit of being dragged into light,
recorded and treated statistically, and how the obscurity that attends the
initial steps of our thoughts can thus be pierced and dissipated. I then
showed measurably the rate at which associations sprung up, their
character, the date of their first formation, their tendency to recurrence,
and their relative precedence. Also I gave an instance showing how the
phenomenon of a long-forgotten scene, suddenly starting into
consciousness, admitted in many cases of being explained. Perhaps the
strongest of the impressions left by these experiments regards the
multifariousness of the work done by the mind in a state of half-
unconsciousness, and the valid reason they afford for believing in the
existence of still deeper strata of mental operations, sunk wholly below
the level of consciousness, which may account for such mental
phenomena as cannot otherwise be explained. We gain an insight by these
experiments into the marvellous
