I took pains to determine as far as feasible the dates of my life at which each of the associated ideas was first attached to the word. There were 124 cases in which identification was satisfactory, and they were distributed as in Table II.
TABLE II
RELATIVE NUMBER OF ASSOCIATIONS
FORMED AT DIFFERRENT PERIODS OF LIFE
| Total Number of Different Associations. | Occurring | Whose First Formation was in | ||||||||
| Four times | Three Times | Twice | Once | |||||||
| Per cent | Per cent | Per cent | Per cent | Per cent | ||||||
| 48 | 39 | 12 | 10 | 11 | 9 | 9 | 7 | 16 | 13 | Boyhood and Youth |
| 57 | 46 | 10 | 8 | 8 | 7 | 6 | 5 | 33 | 26 | Subsequent Manhood |
| 19 | 15 | 4 | 3 | 1 | 1 | 14 | 44 | Quite Recent Events | ||
| 124 | 100 | 22 | 18 | 23 | 19 | 16 | 13 | 63 | 50 | Totals |
It will be seen from the Table that out of the 48 earliest associations no less than 12, or one quarter of them, occurred in each of the four trials; of the 57 associations first formed in manhood, 10, or about one-sixth of them, had a similar recurrence, but as to the 19 other associations first formed in quite recent times, not one of them occurred in the whole of the four trials. Hence we may see the greater fixity of the earlier associations, and might measurably determine the decrease of fixity as the date of their first formation becomes less remote.
The largeness of the number 33 in the middle entry of the last column but one, which disconcerts the run of the series, is wholly due to a visual memory of places seen in manhood. I will not speak about this now, as I shall have to refer to it farther on. Neglecting, for the moment, this unique class of occurrences, it will be seen that one-half of the associations date from the period of life before leaving college; and it may easily be imagined that many of these refer to common events in an English education. Nay further, on looking through the list of all the associations it was easy to see how they are pervaded by purely English ideas, and especially such as are prevalent in that stratum of English society in which I was born and bred, and have subsequently lived. In illustration of this, I may mention an anecdote of a matter which greatly impressed me at the time. I was staying in a country house with a very pleasant party of young and old, including persons whose education and versatility were certainly not below the social average. One evening we played at a round game, which consisted in each of us drawing as absurd a scrawl as he or she could, representing some historical event; the pictures were then shuffled and passed successively from hand to hand, every one writing down independently their interpretation of the picture, as to what the historical event was that the artist intended to depict by the scrawl. I was astonished at the sameness of our ideas. Cases like Canute and the waves, the Babes in the Tower, and the like, were drawn by two and even three persons at the same time, quite independently of one another, showing how narrowly we are bound by the fetters of our early education. If the figures in the above Table may be accepted as fairly correct for the world generally, it shows, still in a measurable degree, the large effect of early education in fixing our associations. It will of course be understood that I make no absurd profession of being able by these very few experiments to lay down statistical constants of universal application, but that my principal object is to show that a large class of mental phenomena, that have hitherto been too vague to lay hold of, admit of being caught by the firm grip of genuine statistical inquiry. The results that I have thus far given are hotch-pot results. It is necessary to sort the materials somewhat before saying more about them.
After several trials I found that the associated ideas admitted of being divided into three main groups. First there is the imagined sound of words, as in verbal quotations or names of persons. This was frequently a mere parrot-like memory which acted instantaneously and in a meaningless way, just as a machine might act. In the next group there was every other kind of sense imagery; the chime of imagined bells, the shiver of remembered cold, the scent of some particular locality, and, much more frequently than all the rest put together, visual imagery. The last of the three groups contains what I will venture, for the want of a better name, to call "histrionic" representations. It includes those cases where I either act a part in imagination, or see in imagination a part acted, or, most commonly by far, where I am both spectator and all the actors at once, in an imaginary mental theatre. Thus I feel a nascent sense of some muscular action while I simultaneously witness a puppet of my brain--a part of myself--perform that action, and I assume a mental attitude appropriate to the occasion. This, in my case, is a very frequent way of generalising, indeed I rarely feel that I have secure hold of a general idea until I have translated it somehow into this form. Thus the word "abasement" presented itself to me, in one of my experiments, by my mentally placing myself in a pantomimic attitude of humiliation with half-closed eyes, bowed head, and uplifted palms, while at the same time I was aware of myself as of a mental puppet, in that position. This same word will serve to illustrate the other groups also. It so happened in connection with "abasement" that the word "David" or "King David" occurred to me on one occasion in each of three out of the four trials; also that an accidental misreading, or perhaps the merely punning association of the words "a basement," brought up on all four occasions the image of the foundations of a house that the builders had begun upon.
So much for the character of the association; next as to that of the words. I found, after the experiments were over, that the words were divisible into three distinct groups. The first contained "abbey," "aborigines," "abyss," and others that admitted of being presented under some mental image. The second group contained "abasement," "abhorrence," "ablution," etc., which admitted excellently of histrionic representation. The third group contained the more abstract words, such as "afternoon," "ability," "abnormal," which were variously and imperfectly dealt with by my mind. I give the results in the upper part of Table III., and, in order to save trouble, I have reduced them to percentages in the lower lines of the Table.