meaning, outlining and broad relationships. This is
on the side of whole learning, for it is when you are going through
the whole that you catch its general drift, and see the connections of
the several parts and their places in the whole. This factor is so
important as to outweigh the preceding two in many cases, especially
with experienced learners dealing with meaningful material. Even if
you should prefer the part method, you would be wise to begin by a
careful survey of the whole.

{346}

(4) The factor of permanency. This is something "physiological", and
it is on the side of spaced learning. The muscles profit more by
exercise with intervals of rest than by a large amount of continuous
exercise, and no athlete would think for a moment of training for a
contest of strength by "cramming" for it. Apparently the neurones obey
the same law as the muscles, and for that reason spaced learning gives
more durable results than unspaced.

Unintentional Learning

What we have been examining is intentional memorizing, with the "will
to learn" strongly in the game. The assertion has sometimes been made
that the will to learn is necessary if any learning is to be
accomplished. We must look into this matter, for it has an important
bearing on the whole question of the process of learning.

There is a famous incident that occurred in a Swiss psychological
laboratory, when a foreign student was supposed to be memorizing a
list of nonsense syllables. After the list had been passed before him
many times without his giving the expected signal that he was ready to
recite, the experimenter remarked that he seemed to be having trouble
in memorizing the syllables. "Oh! I didn't understand that I was to
learn them", he said, and it was found that, in fact, he had made
almost no progress towards learning the list. He had been observing
the separate syllables, with no effort to connect them into a series.

Another incident: subjects were put repeatedly through a "color naming
test", which consisted of five colors repeated in irregular order, the
object being to name the one hundred bits of color as rapidly as
possible. After the subjects had been through this test over two
hundred times, you would think they could recite it from memory; but
not {347} at all! They had very little memory of the order of the bits
of color. Their efforts had been wholly concentrated upon naming the
bits as seen, and not in connecting them into a serie