him to measure off equal spaces, and a judgment that is made by
sweeping the finger over a card, as in Dresslar's experiments, with a
uniform motion, and then, after the movement has ceased, pronouncing
judgment upon the relative lengths of the two spaces. In the former
case the subject moves his finger uniformly until he approaches the
region of equality, and then slackens his speed and slowly comes to a
standstill. This of course changes the character of the judgments.
Both of these defects I remedied in another apparatus which will be
described later. For my present purpose I may disregard these
objections, as they affect alike all the judgments.

In making the tests for the first series, the subject removed his
finger after each judgment, so that the position of the apparatus
could be changed and the subject made to enter upon the new judgment
without knowing either the approximate length or the nature of the
filling of this new test. With this apparatus no attempt was made to
discover the effects of introducing changes in the rate of speed. The
only requirement was that the motion should be uniform. This does not
mean that I disregarded the factor of speed. On the contrary, this
_time_ element I consider as of the highest consequence in the whole
of the present investigation. But I soon discovered, in these
experiments, that the subjects themselves varied the rate of speed
from judgment to judgment over a wide range of rates. There was no
difficulty in keeping track of these variations, by recording the
judgments under three groups, fast, slow and medium. But I found that
I could do this more conveniently with another apparatus, and will
tell at a later place of the results of introducing a time element. In
these first experiments the subject was allowed to use any rate of
speed which was convenient to him.