Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 14.djvu/792

772 conscious life. I will describe a few of the results of my own self-examination in respect to associated ideas.

It was after many minor trials that one afternoon I felt myself in a humor for the peculiar and somewhat severe mental effort that was required to carry through a sufficiently prolonged experiment as follows: I occupied myself during a walk from the Athenæum Club, along Pall Mall to St. James's Street, a distance of some 450 yards, in keeping a half-glance on what went on in my mind, as I looked with intent scrutiny at the successive objects that caught my eye. The instant each new idea arose, it was absolutely dismissed, and another was allowed to occupy its place. I never permitted my mind to ramble into any bypaths, but strictly limited its work to the formation of nascent ideas in association with the several objects that I saw. The ideas were, therefore, too fleeting to leave more than vague impressions in my memory. Nevertheless, I retained enough of what had taken place to be amazed at the amount of work my brain had performed. I was aware that my mind had traveled, during that brief walk, in the most discursive manner throughout the experiences of my whole life; that it had entered as an habitual guest into numberless localities that it had certainly never visited under the light of full consciousness for many years; and, in short, I inferred that my every-day brain-work was incomparably more active, and that my ideas traveled far wider afield, than I had previously any distinct conception of.

My desire became intensely stimulated to try further experiments, and, as a first commencement of them, to repeat the walk under similar circumstances. I purposely allowed a few days to elapse before doing so, during which I resolutely refused to allow my thoughts to revert to what had taken place, in order that I might undergo the repetition of the trial with as fresh a mind as possible. Again I took the walk, and again I was aware of the vast number of extremely faint thoughts that had arisen; but I was surprised and somewhat humiliated to find that a large proportion of them were identical with those that had occurred on the previous occasion. I was satisfied that their recurrence had in only a very few cases been due to mere recollection. They seemed for the most part to be founded on associations so long and firmly established, that their recurrence might be expected in a future trial, when these past experiments should have wholly disappeared from the memory.

It now became my object to seize upon these fleeting ideas before they had wholly escaped, to record and analyze them, and so to obtain a definite knowledge of their character and of the frequency of their recurrence, and such other collateral information as the experiments might afford.

The plan I adopted was to suddenly display a printed word, to allow about a couple of ideas to successively present themselves, and then, by a violent mental revulsion and sudden awakening of attention, to