Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 9.djvu/100

86 T. LE MAECHANT DOUSE : of certain definite kinds. Thus (1), his attention, which should be fixed, say, on Z, may be for a moment perturbed by the sight or expectation of the coming P or A, and he takes a p or an a and puts it into Z ; or (2), having put an a into one of those two A's, he may imagine that he has filled both, and pass on to Q ; or (3), especially if he is working with both hands, after taking, suppose, a b in the left hand and an s in the right, he may interchange, and put s into B and b into S ; or (4), he may be influenced by the sight or per- sistent impression of what he has just done, say in the case of the two successive A's, and will thus be led to continue the as by putting one into Q ; or (5), and lastly, the inter- ference may be due to what is not actually before him : if, for instance, he has had to deal very frequently with a bird n, this n may be suggested by the call for another but less familiar bird which somewhat resembles it, say m ; and so, instead of m, he will put an n into M. Now these hypo- thetical forms of error symbolise with exactitude the chief classes of mistakes made by generally good spellers. But before entering on details I must explain that my attention was drawn to this subject by reading the answers of candidates at a certain University Examination. Of the Answer-books given in I have read nearly a thousand during the past year. The average age of the candidates was over nineteen years ; and except some half-dozen (who are here left out of account) they were all excellent spellers. Being set down to write, under pressure and against time, compo- sitions of their own upon given questions, those young people may be considered to have been involuntary subjects of a Psychological Experiment, with the advantage to the experi- menter that they were totally unaware of it. Their com- paratively few-and-far-between mistakes were at first passed as sporadic eccentricities ; but when mistakes of a similar character, and some even of identical form, appeared again and again in the answers of different candidates, it seemed to me obvious that they must be due to a common cause or common causes ; and this became demonstrable as soon as I had jotted down and classified a few scores of them. Speak- ing generally the cause, of the perturbations, except as regards one class, was found to be a momentary withdrawal of attention from the point at which the pen had arrived in the process of writing, and its transference to some neighbouring point in the line of ideas which the mind had evolved or was striving to evolve. The different species, so to say, of inter- ferences, or, in other words, the various modes of action of the general cause, are, as I just now said, foreshadowed by