Indeed the ‘brass-instrument psychologists,’ who do such admirable work in their laboratories, have invented an experiment on the effect of significant words which every one may try for himself.  Let him get a friend to write in large letters on cards a series of common political terms, nations, parties, principles, and so on.  Let him then sit before a watch recording tenths of seconds, turn up the cards, and practise observation of the associations which successively enter his consciousness.  The first associations revealed will be automatic and obviously ‘illogical.’  If the word be ‘England’ the white and black marks on the paper will, if the experimenter is a ‘visualiser,’ produce at once a picture of some kind accompanied by a vague and half conscious emotional reaction of affection, perhaps, or anxiety, or the remembrance of puzzled thought.  If the experimenter is ‘audile,’ the marks will first call up a vivid sound image with which a like emotional reaction may be associated.  I 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.’