ords incorrectly,
changing and, above all, omitting letters. These sentences were exposed
in a darkened room. The person who served as the subject of the
experiment was placed before them and did not know, of course, what had
been written. Then the inscription was illuminated by the electric light
for a very short time, too short for the observer to be able to perceive
really all the letters. They began by determining experimentally the
time necessary for seeing one letter of the alphabet. It was then easy
to arrange it so that the observer could not perceive more than eight or
ten letters, for example, of the thirty or forty letters composing the
formula. Usually, however, he read the entire phrase without difficulty.
But that is not for us the most instructive point of this experiment.

If the observer is asked what are the letters that he is sure of having
seen, these may be, of course, the letters really written, but there may
be also absent letters, either letters that we replaced by others or
that have simply been omitted. Thus an observer will see quite
distinctly in full light a letter which does not exist, if this letter,
on account of the general sense, ought to enter into the phrase. The
characters which have really affected the eye have been utilized only to
serve as an indication to the unconscious memory of the observer. This
memory, discovering the appropriate remembrance, _i.e._, finding the
formula to which these characters give a start toward realization,
projects the remembrance externally in an hallucinatory form. It is
this remembrance, and not the words themselves, that the observer has
seen. It is thus demonstrated that rapid reading is in great part a work
of divination, but not of abstract divination. It is an externalization
of memories which take advantage, to a certain extent, of the partial
realization that they find here and there in order to completely realize
themselves.

Thus, in the waking state and in the knowledge that we get of the real
objects which surround us, an operation is continually going on which is
of quite the same nature as that of the dream. We perceive merely a
sketch of the object. This sketch appeals to the complete memory, and
this complete memory, which by itself was either unconscious or simply
in the thought state, profits by the occasion to come out. It is this
kind of hallucination, inserted and fitted into a real frame, that we
perceive. It is a shorter proces