galton.org 141
Psychometric Experiments
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the decrease of fixity as the date of their first formation becomes less
remote.
The largeness of the number 33 in the middle entry of the last column
but one, which disconcerts the run of the series, is wholly due to a visual
memory of places seen in manhood. I will not speak about this now, as I
shall have to refer to it farther on. Neglecting, for the moment, this unique
class of occurrences, it will be seen that one-half of the associations date
from the period of life before leaving college; and it may easily be
imagined that many of these refer to common events in an English
education. Nay further, on looking through the list of all the associations it
was easy to see how they are pervaded by purely English ideas, and
especially such as are prevalent in that stratum of English society in which
I was born and bred, and have subsequently lived. In illustration of this, I
may mention an anecdote of a matter which greatly impressed me at the
time. I was staying in a country house with a very pleasant party of young
and old, including persons whose education and versatility were certainly
not below the social average. One evening we played at a round game,
which consisted in each of us drawing as absurd a scrawl as he or she
could, representing some historical event; the pictures were then shuffled
and passed successively from hand to hand, every one writing down
independently their interpretation of the picture, as to what the historical
event was that the artist intended to depict by the scrawl. I was astonished
at the sameness of our ideas. Cases like Canute and the waves, the Babes
in the Tower, and the like, were drawn by two and even three persons at
the same time, quite, independently of one another, showing how
narrowly we are bound by the fetters of our early education. If the figures
in the above Table may be accepted as fairly correct for the world
generally, it shows, still in a measurable degree, the large effect of early
education in fixing our associations. It will of course be understood that I
make no absurd profession of being able by these very few experiments to
lay down statistical constants of universal application, but that my
principal object is to show that a large class of mental phenomena, that
have hitherto been too vague to lay hold of admit of being caught by the
firm grip, of genuine statistical inquiry.
