n ruler and ruled, or of the pleasure and
pain which experience had shown to be derived from royal leadership and
royal punishments, and that he therefore decided by a process of
reasoning on seeing the staff to fear the king.

When the symbol by which our impulse is stimulated is actual language,
it is still more difficult not to confuse acquired emotional association
with the full process of logical inference. Because one of the effects
of those sounds and signs which we call language is to stimulate in us a
process of deliberate logical thought we tend to ignore all their other
effects. Nothing is easier than to make a description of the logical use
of language, the breaking up by abstraction of a bundle of
sensations--one's memory, for instance, of a royal person; the selection
of a single quality--kingship, for instance--shared by other such
bundles of sensations, the giving to that quality the name king, and the
use of the name to enable us to repeat the process of abstraction. When
we are consciously trying to reason correctly by the use of language all
this does occur, just as it would occur if we had not evolved the use of
voice-language at all, and were attempting to construct a valid logic of
colours and models and pictures. But any text-book of psychology will
explain why it errs, both by excess and defect, if taken as a
description of that which actually happens when language is used for the
purpose of stimulating us to action.

Indeed the 'brass-instrument psychologists,' who do such admirable work
in their laboratories, have invented an experiment on the effect of
significant words which every one may try for himself. Let him get a
friend to write in large letters on cards a series of common political
terms, nations, parties, principles, and so on. Let him then sit before
a watch recording tenths of seconds, turn up the cards, and practise
observation of the associations which successively enter his
consciousness. The first associations revealed will be automatic and
obviously 'illogical.' If the word be 'England' the white and black
marks on the paper will, if the experimenter is a 'visualiser,' produce
at once a picture of some kind accompanied by a vague and half conscious
emotional reaction of affection, perhaps, or anxiety, or the remembrance
of puzzled thought. If the experimenter is 'audile,' the marks will
first call up a vivid sound image with which a like emotional reaction
may be associated. I