or on the morning of the next day, he has both groups
equally firmly in his mind, but three days later most of what was
learned to be kept is still present. On the other hand, those verses
and dates which were learned with the consciousness that they had to
serve the next day have essentially faded away when the time of the
test has passed, even if the test itself was not given. Every lawyer
knows from his experience how easily he forgets the details of the
case which has once been settled by the court, as he has absorbed the
material only for the purpose of having it present up to the end of
the procedure. These Swedish experiments have given a cue to further
investigations, and everything seems to confirm this view. It brings
out in a very significant way that the impressions which are made on
our mind from without are in their effectiveness on the mind entirely
dependent upon the subjective attitude, and the idea that the same
visual stimuli stir up the same mental reactions is entirely
misleading. The attitude of reading and the attitude of looking at
advertisements are so fundamentally different that the whole mental
mechanism is in a different setting.

The result is that whenever we are in the reading attitude, we cannot
take the real advertising effect out of the pictures and notices which
are to draw us to the consumption of special articles. The editor who
forces his wisdom into the propaganda page is hurting the advertiser,
who, after all, pays for nothing else but the opportunity to make a
certain psychological impression on the reader. He gets a third more
of this effect for which he has to pay so highly if he can have his
advertisement on a clean sheet which brings the whole mind into that
willing attitude to receive suggestions for buying only. It is most
probable that the particular form of the experiment here reported
makes this difference between advertising pages with and without
reading matter much smaller than it is in the actual perusal of
magazines, as we forced the attention of the individual on every page
for an equal time. In the leisurely method of going through the
magazine the interfering effect of the editorial part would be still
greater. Compared with this antagonism of mental setting, it means
rather little that these scattered pieces of text induce the reader to
open the advertisement. If we were really of that austere intellect
which consistently sticks to that which is editorially bac