urred that I puzzled wholly over
a word, and made no entry at all; in thirteen cases either this
happened, or else after one idea had occurred the second was too
confused and obscure to admit of record, and mention of it had to be
omitted in the foregoing Table. These entries have forcibly shown to
me the great imperfection in my generalising powers; and I am sure
that most persons would find the same if they made similar trials.
Nothing is a surer sign of high intellectual capacity than the power
of quickly seizing and easily manipulating ideas of a very abstract
nature. Commonly we grasp them very imperfectly, and cling to their
skirts with great difficulty.

In comparing the order in which the ideas presented themselves, I
find that a decided precedence is assumed by the histrionic ideas,
wherever they occur; that verbal associations occur first and with
great quickness on many occasions, but on the whole that they are
only a little more likely to occur first than second; and that
imagery is decidedly more likely to be the second than the first of
the associations called up by a word. In short, gesture-language
appeals the most quickly to my feelings,

It would be very instructive to print the actual records at length,
made by many experimenters, if the records could be clubbed together
and thrown into a statistical form; but it would be too absurd to
print one's own singly. They lay bare the foundations of a man's
thoughts with curious distinctness, and exhibit his mental anatomy
with more vividness and truth than he would probably care to publish
to the world.

It remains to summarise what has been said in the foregoing memoir.
I have desired to show how whole 1 strata of mental operations that
have lapsed out of ordinary consciousness, admit of being dragged
into light, recorded and treated statistically, and how the
obscurity that attends the initial steps of our thoughts can thus be
pierced and dissipated. I then showed measurably the rate at which
associations sprung up, their character, the date of their first
formation, their tendency to recurrence, and their relative
precedence. Also I gave an instance showing how the phenomenon of a
long-forgotten scene, suddenly starting into consciousness, admitted
in many cases of being explained. Perhaps the strongest of the
impressions left by these experiments regards the multifariousness
of the work done by the mind in a state of half-unconsciousness, and
the va