Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 83.djvu/158

154 areas pass before us in visual thought. Limiting sequences follow one another in senile thought. The dominance of spatial concepts indicate premature sensory associations preventing the outward movement of thought to unexplored regions. The dominance of fixed sequences in thought reveals a lack of energy and of objective adjustment. Motor thought begins not in established mental associations but in bodily movements, aroused by external contacts. If movement precedes thought, action is adjustive; when thought determines movement abnormal mental states or senile limitations cause thought to flow on without any adjustive tests of its truth. Normally each thought should start a train of muscular activity leading to adjustment. Thought should be transformed into movement, and movement into thought. The morbid intensity of particular centers prevents this by forming a series of related ideas instead of transforming thought into movement. Visual or word repetitions are thus the marks of morbidness due to motor strains. This dance of sensory ideas with no accompanying activity is, however, regarded not as a defect but as an excellence. Such abnormalities are regarded as native powers when they should be recognized as acquired disjustments. Few readers will be willing to admit this. To do so would call into question conventional standards and strike at cherished literary and artistic concepts.

I can make my meaning clear by example better than by argument. When the American Academy of Political and Social Science was formed. President James and I had a discussion as to the title of the organization. He contended that the title should contain an "and," and I was equally firm in the opinion that the "and" should be omitted. He argued that without the "and" the scope of the society would not be regarded as comprehensive, while I asserted that with it the title would lack a definiteness in aim. It was a long time before I realized what was the real difference between President James and myself. I found that I, myself, was constantly tending to put "ands" in sentences and to pile adjectives on top of one another. When I made a short, crisp sentence I came back to it, thinking that I had left something out. This feeling was often so strong that I could not get away from the sentence until I had added something, or balanced it, as a rhetorician would say. I finally hit on the cause of my feeling, or at least an explanation that seemed satisfactory. The place where this tendency was strong was where the word had some closely related synonym, which, stored in my subconscious memory, strove to express itself and troubled me until I dragged it forth and made it a companion of the word I had used. If I had no double associations of words I wrote easily, but the flow of thought was checked at points where double associations existed. There I either expressed my thought twice or underwent a mental conflict until I drove the related word out of consciousness. The title to which I have called attention is an illustration of