Page:The Journal of English and Germanic Philology Volume 18.djvu/249

 The Rythmical Line 243 may be confident that we are really dealing with primitive con- ditions. Culture would be absolutely primitive if no antecedent mental development whatsoever could be presupposed. Such an absolute concept can never be realized in experience." (Wundt) 2 In the epic line of Homer and of the Germanic epic, we have rhythmical series of six and four accents, six being the limit never exceeded in the typical long lines. Now, in accounting for these lines in terms of psychological interpretation, several factors must be reckoned with. First of these, in importance, is the observation presented in Wundt's psychological experiments, that the capacity of the mind for holding ideas or sense percepts, clearly and distinctly, is pretty definitely limited. It is here a question of the range of immediate consciousness, the power of the mind to grasp a cer- tain number of ideational elements or percepts together, as a whole, or a unit of ideation. The methods of experimentation and of direct introspection can be employed to equal advantage. Of experiments in sense perception it will suffice to quote the result of visual tests. "The number of clear ideas for the sense of sight amounts to four or five when they are simple and fami- liar. If they are complex the number varies from one to three, according to the degree of complexity." Specifically on the point of our present inquiry Wundt says "If we look at the metrical forms employed in music and poetry we find that the limit of three degrees is never exceeded. The absolute amount of accentuation may, of course, be very different in different cases. But in immediate perception these different degrees are always arranged in three principal classes which are alone of any real importance in metrical division as a basis of classifica- tion in metrical forms. As a matter of fact, however, music and poetry never push their use of this aid in the formation of easily comprehended ideational series to the extreme limit of conscious grouping. Each member in a rhythmical series must be referred to its predecessors, and for this to be done with pleasure and without effort, it is necessary that the grasp of 2 The quotations from Wundt are taken from his Physiologische Psychology and his Elements of Folk Psychology.