am a 'visualiser,' and the picture in my case was a
blurred triangular outline. Other 'visualisers' have described to me the
picture of a red flag, or of a green field (seen from a railway
carriage), as automatically called up by the word England. After the
automatic picture or sound image and its purely automatic emotional
accompaniment comes the 'meaning' of the word, the things one knows
about England, which are presented to the memory by a process
semi-automatic at first, but requiring before it is exhausted a severe
effort. The question as to what images and feelings shall appear at each
stage is, of course, settled by all the thoughts and events of our past
life, but they appear, in the earlier moments at least of the
experiment, before we have time consciously to reflect or choose.

A corresponding process may be set up by other symbols besides language.
If in the experiment the hats belonging to members of a family be
substituted for the written cards, the rest of the process will go
on--the automatic 'image,' automatically accompanied by emotional
association, being succeeded in the course of a second or so by the
voluntary realisation of 'meaning,' and finally by a deliberate effort
of recollection and thought. Tennyson, partly because he was a born poet
and partly perhaps because his excessive use of tobacco put his brain
occasionally a little out of focus, was extraordinarily accurate in his
account of those separate mental states which for most men are merged
into one by memory. A song, for instance, in the 'Princess,' describes
the succession which I have been discussing:--

'Thy voice is heard through rolling drums,
That beat to battle where he stands.
Thy face across his fancy comes,
And gives the battle to his hands:
A moment, while the trumpets blow,
He sees his brood about thy knee;
The next, like fire he meets the foe,
And strikes him dead for thine and thee.'

'Thine and thee' at the end seem to me to express precisely the change
from the automatic images of 'voice' and 'face' to the reflective mood
in which the full meaning of that for which he fights is realised.

But it is the 'face' that 'gives the battle to his hands.' Here again,
as we saw when comparing impulses themselves, it is the evolutionarily
earlier more automatic, fact that has the greater, and the later
intellectual fact which has the less impulsive power. Even as one sits
in one's chair one can feel that that