23 | 33 |
================+==============+============+===========+=========+
Total Number of | |
Different | Occurring |
Associations. +-------------------------------------------------+
| Four times. |Three times.| Twice. | Once. |
----------------+--------------+------------+-----------+---------+
289 | 29 | 36 | 57 | 167 |
----------------+--------------+------------+-----------+---------+
Per cent . 100 | 10 | 12 | 20 | 58 |
================+==============+============+===========+=========+

I was fully prepared to find much iteration in my ideas but had
little expected that out of every hundred words twenty-three would
give rise to exactly the same association in every one of the four
trials; twenty-one to the same association in three out of the four,
and so on, the experiments having been purposely conducted under
very different conditions of time and local circumstances. This shows
much less variety in the mental stock of ideas than I had expected,
and makes us feel that the roadways of our minds are worn into very
deep ruts. I conclude from the proved number of faint and barely
conscious thoughts, and from the proved iteration of them, that the
mind is perpetually travelling over familiar ways without our memory
retaining any impression of its excursions. Its footsteps are so
light and fleeting that it is only by such experiments as I have
described that we can learn anything about them. It is apparently
always engaged in mumbling over its old stores, and if any one of
these is wholly neglected for a while, it is apt to be forgotten,
perhaps irrecoverably. It is by no means the keenness of interest
and of the attention when first observing an object, that fixes it
in the recollection. We pore over the pages of a _Bradshaw_, and
study the trains for some particular journey with the greatest
interest; but the event passes by, and the hours and other facts
which we once so eagerly considered become absolutely forgotten. So
in games of whist, and in a large number of similar instances. As I
understand it, the subject must have a continued living interest in
order to retain an abiding place in the memory. The mind must refer
to it frequently, but whether it does so consciously or
unconsciously is not perhaps a matte