Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 11.djvu/70

 STUDIES OF KHYTHM, I. 59 pronounced to be two or three respectively. It would be well if observations were so directed as to ascertain, at least up to ten or twenty, the increase required by each additional click in a series for the sense of discontinuity to remain constant throughout. (2) Counting requires a series of innervations, if not of actual muscular contractions. So far Strieker is probably correct, un- critically as he overlooks other elements in the process. The most rapid contraction of antagonistic muscles in trilling by pianists who have given us their record, or the rapid lingual movements involved in aspirating the sounds t, k, recorded by a Marey tambour, we have never found to exceed and rarely to reach six double or twelve single contractions per sec., while few can make more than four or five double movements in that time. There is thus at any rate a wide interval between the most rapid innervations and the limit of discriminative audibility for succes- sive sounds. Attention, in other words, discriminates sensation much more rapidly than the will can generate impulses. How this fact is reconciled with any extreme form of the hypothesis of the identity of apperceptive and volitional processes, it is not easy to see. No one would surely venture to assume that, because we can volitionally cut short the otherwise normal duration of a single innervation-impulse by innervating an antagonistic muscle, the extreme limit of distinguishing elements in a series of noises marks really the limit of this abbreviation. (3) Counting involves the matching, pairing or approximative synchronisation of the terms in two series of events in conscious- ness. However familiar both series may be, this is difficult. Many school-children find it hard to keep step with others or to keep time with a drum or piano in marching, and savages have been reported to sight across each stick used as a counter at animals they were selling, to keep the correct tale. Even in registering transits, some observers record the instant the edge of the dancing star first touches the threads and others wait till it seems exactly bisected by it. Again, one anticipates the instant and practically eliminates his physiological time, while another admits it in full ; hence the personal equation is far greater than can be accounted for by physiological or reaction-time. Wundt's ingenious obser- vation upon an index moving across marks on a dial to simulate the transit of a star showed the great difficulty, if not impossi- bility, of identifying in time the perception of two really syn- chronous impressions on disparate senses. What now becomes of the lost clicks when we are constantly behind in counting, yet with great subjective assurance that we are right ? It will hardly be sufficient to say that, when counting with great energy and concentration, we cease to attend to the auditory series, stretching the interval we caught the tempo of at the beginning of the series, as all short intervals are expanded when we come to perceive only our innervations. We may however conceive the earliest an- nouncement of the impression of the first click in consciousness,