136 galton.org
136
Inquiries into Human Faculty
I stopped the chronograph and wrote them down, and the time they
occupied. I soon got into the way of doing all this in a very methodical
and automatic manner, keeping the mind perfectly calm and neutral, but
intent and, as it were, at full cock and on hair trigger, before displaying
the word. There was no disturbance occasioned by thinking of the
forthcoming revulsion of the mind the moment before the chronograph
was stopped. My feeling before stopping, it was simply that I had delayed
long enough, and this in no way interfered with the free action of the
mind. I found no trouble in ensuring the complete fairness of the
experiment, by using a number of little precautions, hardly necessary to
describe, that practice quickly suggested, but it was a most repugnant and
laborious work, and it was only by strong self-control that I went through
my schedule according to programme. The list of words that I finally
secured was 75 in number, though I began with more. I went through
them on four separate occasions, under very different circumstances, in
England and abroad, and at intervals of about a month. In no case were
the associations governed to any degree worth recording, by remembering
what had occurred to me on previous occasions, for I found that the
process itself had great influence in discharging the memory of what it
had just been engaged in, and I, of course, took care between the
experiments never to let my thoughts revert to the words. The results seem
to me to be as trustworthy as any other statistical series that has been
collected with equal care.
On throwing these results into a common statistical hotchpot, I first
examined into the rate at which these associated ideas were formed. It
took a total time of 660 seconds to form the 505 ideas; that is, at about the
rate of 50 in a minute, or 3000 in an hour. This would be miserably slow
work in reverie, or wherever the thought follows the lead of each
association that successively presents itself. In the present case, much
time was lost in mentally taking the word in, owing to the quiet
unobtrusive way in which I found it necessary to bring it into view, so as
not to distract the thoughts. Moreover, a substantive standing by itself is
usually the equivalent of too abstract an idea for us to conceive properly
without delay. Thus it is very
