Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 75.djvu/155

Rh intuitions of the graphologist. Experimental work that seeks to induce variation in writing through a control of outer conditions must in time correlate certain definite variations in conditions with variation in such aspects of writing as size, speed, accuracy in alignment, inequality of control and the like.

The experimental investigations, spoken of above, have attacked the problem at this point. Abandoning any attempt to deal with the more complicated aspects of chirography as an expression of individuality, they have confined themselves to an accurate analysis of such factors as speed of movement and its variations; the length and significance of writing-pauses; measurement of pressure and its variations; comparison of the accuracy of control for right and left hand; elimination of visual control; minute analysis of finger, wrist and arm movements involved in handwriting, with an assignment to each of its rôle. Such an investigation, so far as it confines itself to mere analysis, is obviously but a part of the general investigation of voluntary action. But the discovery of methods of accurately registering minute variations in writing speed, pressure, amplitude and musculature is necessarily preliminary to an accurate determination of the correlation between particular psychic traits and their expression graphically.

An illustration of what may be expected from the perfecting of the technique of registration of speed, pressure and amplitude of writing is to be found in the report of a piece of work carried out some years ago in a German laboratory, where it was discovered that increased difficulty in mental work showed itself in written expression by increased pressure or by decrease in the size of the written characters. The former way of meeting the difficulty seemed to be characteristic of men; the latter, characteristic of women.

Variation in the amplitude of written characters involves doubtless many important considerations relative to the facilitation and inhibition of movement. Writing with attention preoccupied or distracted results variously in the enlargement or dwarfing of characters, an alternative result that seems to depend upon deep-seated tendencies of the individual. If, as facts apparently show, the individual who is the more automatic in his activities responds to distraction with an increase in the size of characters used; while one less automatic, one whose attention—though sometimes in a maimed condition—is always at the helm, gives evidence of the mental difficulty by a decrease in amplitude, a decrease that bears witness to the inhibition at work, then a very simple test is at hand by means of which individuals may be grouped under the two types that have been labeled, somewhat ambiguously, motor and sensory. If it should be shown further that this difference cuts through all the mental activities of the human being, progress would have been made in the difficult matter of the classification of mental types.