Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 14.djvu/795

Rh recollected are by no means atomic elements of thought; on the contrary, they are frequently glimpses over whole provinces of mental experiences and into the openings of far vistas of associations, that we know to be familiar to us, though the mind does not at the moment consciously travel down any part of them. Think what even three thousand such ideas would imply if they were all different! A man's autobiography, in two large volumes of live hundred pages each, would not hold them, for no biography contains, on an average, three such sequences of incident and feeling in a page. There must therefore be, of a necessity, frequent recurrences of the same thought; and this fact was brought out quite as prominently by these experiments as by my walks along Pall Mall. They were also elicited in a form in which I could submit them to measurement.

The 75 words gone through on four successive occasions made a total of 300 separate trials, and gave rise between them to 505 ideas in the space of 660 seconds. There were, however, so many cases of recurrence that the number of different ideas proved to be only 279. Twenty-nine of the words gave rise to the same thought in every one of the four trials, thirty-six to the same thought in three out of the four trials, fifty-seven to two out of the four, and there were only one hundred and sixty-seven ideas that occurred no more than once. Thus we see how great is the tendency to the recurrence of the same ideas. It is conspicuous in the reiteration of anecdotes by old people, but it pervades all periods of life to a greater extent than is commonly understood, the mind habitually rambling along the same trite paths. I have been much struck by this fact in the successive editions, so to speak, of the narratives of explorers and travelers in wild countries. I have had numerous occasions, owing to a long and intimate connection with the Geographical Society, of familiarizing myself with these editions. Letters are in the first instance received from the traveler while still pursuing his journey; then some colonial newspaper records his first public accounts of it on his reentry into civilized lands; then we hear his tale from his own lips, in conversation in England; then comes his memoir read before the Society; then numerous public speeches, and lastly his book. I am almost invariably struck by the sameness of expression and anecdote in all these performances. (I myself went through all this, more than a quarter of a century ago, on returning from southwest Africa, and was quite as guilty of the fault as any one else.) Now, one would expect that a couple of years or more spent in strange lands among strange people would have filled the mind of the traveler with a practically inexhaustible collection of thoughts and tableaus; but no, the recollections tend to group themselves into a comparatively small number of separate compositions or episodes, and whatever does not fit artistically into these is neglected and finally dropped. We recollect very few of the incidents in our youth, though perhaps in old age we shall think very frequently of