The Subconscious Sets the Pace of Thought — Why "Impossible" Arrives Before the Sentence Is Finished, and the Road Thinking Travels Is Laid by It

A man puts forward an idea and, before the sentence is finished, an answer has arrived: impossible. Say the same thing another way and he nods. Judgement arrives before reasons, so weighing on the spot cannot be fitted into what happened. This paper concludes that the pace of thought is set by the subconscious: what arrives first is not computed but matched — a stored conclusion and the measure that turns conclusions into gain and loss fall together; the answer is handed over with its reasons attached, and reason then works on that same material; however diligently a man thinks, he does not get outside the item he leans on. A third case stands beside those two: where nothing was stored to match, matching fails and only work on the spot remains — slowness is an absence of stored items, not of ability. Four things are done: prove that such a mechanism must exist; explain why thought is fast and why it is sometimes slow; ask what happens when the item it rests on is wrong — one example only: a child raised to blows and shouting stores the conclusion that to change a person this is what must be done, and as an adult his thinking about education still runs on it; then note briefly that this can be moved. This paper ranks nobody, does not argue what deserves the name of education, and promises no one the ability to see through what another leans on.