brought about, the arts are the most powerful, since it is through them that men may most co-operate and in these experiences that the mind most easily and with least interference organises itself. [47] The description of images belongs to the first steps in psychology, and it is often possible to judge the rank and standing of a psychologist by the degree of importance which he attaches to their peculiarities. On theoretical grounds it seems probable that they are luxury products (cf. _The Meaning of Meaning_, pp. 148-151) peculiarly connected with the reproduction of emotion. For a discussion of some experimental investigations into their utility, Spearman, _The Nature of Intelligence_, Ch. XII, may be consulted. [48] Two kinds of onomatopœia should be distinguished. In one the sound of the words (actual or imaginal) is like some natural sound (the buzzing of bees, galloping horses, and so forth). In the other it is not like any such sound but such as merely to call up free auditory images of the sounds in question. The second case is by far the more common. CHAPTER XVII Rhythm and Metre . . . when it approaches with a divine hopping. _The Joyful Wisdom_. Rhythm and its specialised form, metre, depend upon repetition, and expectancy. Equally where what is expected recurs and where it fails, all rhythmical and metrical effects spring from anticipation. As a rule this anticipation is unconscious. Sequences of syllables both as sounds and as images of speech-movements leave the mind ready for certain further sequences rather than for others. Our momentary organisation is adapted to one range of possible stimuli rather than to another. Just as the eye reading print unconsciously expects the spelling to be as usual, and the fount of type to remain the same, so the mind after reading a line or two of verse, or half a sentence of prose, prepares itself ahead for any one of a number of possible sequences, at the same time negatively incapacitating itself for others. The effect produced by what actually follows depends very closely upon this unconscious preparation and consists largely of the further twist which it gives to expectancy. It is in terms of the variation in these twists that rhythm is to be described. Both prose and verse vary immensely in the extent to which they excite this ‘getting ready’ process, and in the narrowness of the anticipation which is formed, Prose on the whole, with the rare exceptions of a Landor, a De Quincey, or a Ruskin, is accompanied by a very much vaguer and more indeterminate expectancy than verse. In such prose as this page, for example, little more than a preparedness for further words not all exactly alike in sound and with abstract polysyllables preponderating is all that arises. In short, the sensory or formal effect of words has very little play in the literature of analysis and exposition. But as’ soon as prose becomes more emotive than scientific,