Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 67.djvu/488

482 purpose; such lapses not only disclose the nature of the ordinary well adjusted relations, but offer an interesting means of determining what otherwise would be but vaguely recognized. As to the conditions favoring such lapses, they are so familiar as to make it sufficient to recall that they occur in moments of weakened or too dispersed attention. It is because the reins are too freely relaxed, or are relaxed at an inopportune moment, that our habits take the bit between the teeth, and, it may be, lead us where we had no intention of wandering. The state of mind in which this, as well as other types of subconscious action, occur, we call distraction; and when it becomes more pronounced, the type of the lapse may become both more variable and indicative of more complex deviations. 'Absent-mindedness' (for which the German has the more telling expression, 'Zerstreutheit') offers the most typical and familiar attitude favorable to the display of these lapses of consciousness, trivial, amusing, but psychologically interesting. It is with the natural history of this familiar species and its varieties that we shall here be occupied.

To obtain a realistic survey of the kind of activities for which the subconscious gearings of our mental machinery are ordinarily held responsible, I instigated an inquiry among a group of persons to whom I had access, asking them little more than to give such accounts of subconscious experiences as they could easily and rather distinctly recall. One need not claim for such a collection anything more than a fairly representative showing of the manner in which the subconscious disports itself in daily life and compels notice by the lack of harmony between intent and execution, or between memory and circumstantial evidence, or by intrusion of the dim and submerged operations into the ken of the conscious self. But as such, and with proper allowance for inaccuracy and prejudice in favor of the more picturesque incidents, their survey