(5) In this chapter we have seen that speech replaces gesture; in § 51, we spoke of the conservatism of gesture, and said that the speech-metaphor might lapse while the gesture persisted. Is there any contradiction?
(6) It is said that the letters of the alphabet were originally hieroglyphics, that is, pictures of actual objects in the external world, and that they have only by very slow degrees become sound-symbols. Suppose this to be true: can you outline the course of change, in psychological terms?
(7) Try, as occasion offers, to analyse (a) the mental attitude of questioning, and (b) the feeling of validity; keep your notes by you, and try again and again. Compare your own results with those obtained by your fellow-students.
(8) James writes that “we ought to say a feeling of and, a feeling of if, a feeling of but, and a feeling of by, quite as readily as we say a feeling of blue or a feeling of cold” (Principles of Psychology, i., 1890, 245 f.): that is to say, we ought to speak of ‘sensations of relation,’ just as we speak of ‘sensations of sight.’ Do you agree? Answer the question, first, in general terms, from the point of view of a scientific psychology; and again in the concrete, after you have observed the mental processes that come with an emphatic but or if.
(9) An examiner sets questions which shall test his students’ knowledge; he also sets questions in order to discover whether they have thought for themselves. How can he tell?
(10) How is it that one can carry a complicated sentence to a smooth grammatical conclusion, without knowing beforehand what words and what form of sentence one is going to employ?
(11) Arrange an experiment on comparison with simultaneously presented stimuli; an experiment, for instance, on the discrimination of hues or of lengths of lines. Outline a psychology of this mode of comparison. Is the comparison always direct? Is there any evidence of absolute impression?
(12) On p. 259 you were asked to distinguish various types of decision; and some of them, as you no doubt found, were not decisions in the proper psychological sense. Can you, in the same way, distinguish types of conclusion, and show that some of them (even after secondary attention has been at work) are not, in the proper psychological sense, judgements?
W. James, Principles of Psychology, i., 1890, chs. ix., xii., xiii.; ii., ch. xxii.; W. Wundt, Lectures on Human and Animal Psychology, 1896, Lects. xxi., xxiv.; Outlines of Psychology, 1907, § 17; T. Ribot, The Evolution of General Ideas, 1899; W. B. Pillsbury, The Psychology of Reasoning, 1910; E. B. Titchener, Experimental Psychology of the Thought-processes, 1909; Text-book of Psychology, 1910, 505 ff.; J. Ward, art. Psychology, in Encyclopædia Britannica, xxii., 1911, 589 ff.