Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 67.djvu/492

486 shop and performed his errand. The instance is apposite in both senses; first, the occurrence of the word 'business' arouses the dormant association with the earlier, somewhat submerged conduct; and secondly, the attempt to explore in this submerged region proceeds by the persistence of slight sensory impressions—faint afterglows—themselves quite uncertain, and not intrinsically connected with the central and important piece of conduct. As in retracing the more conscious links of memory, so also in the case of the subconscious ones, there is a tendency to reach the focus through some suggestive path from a dimly lighted margin.

Though this failure to make an impression upon the mental register offers the simplest formula of a subconscious lapse, it does not present the most common occurrence, presumably because it requires a somewhat marked degree of absorption or absent-mindedness. The most frequent type is that in which an action—usually partially inappropriate—is performed under the impression that it is a different, an intended and appropriate one. The first type is thus the suppression, obliteration, or omission of a strand in the network, the second a partial substitution. Here belong the many comedies of errors, trivial or embarrassing rather than momentous, in the lighter scenes of life's dramas. Cases of going off with a stranger's hat or cloak or umbrella or even his horse and carriage occur constantly, and furnish evidence that the absence of the signs by which we ordinarily recognize our own may itself go unheeded. The successful action of the process appears in the familiar feeling of suddenly missing something, at first not a definite something—cane, umbrella, parcel, book, shopping bag—which one has been carrying and has forgotten at some absorbed point of the day's commissions. It takes but a slight measure of distraction to submerge these superficial impressions so that they fail to perform the service usually expected of them. Lapses that intrinsically have the same status appear in varied situations: students occasionally go to the wrong class room; or find themselves on the way to the university on a Sunday; a college girl appears ready for a social evening in toilette de bal with a 'history' note-book in hand; an actress makes a hurried entrance upon the stage, having snatched a whisk-broom as a fan; a clerk, eating a hurried lunch and eager to start on his bicycle upon an important errand, finds himself carrying his chair out of doors, and making the initial movement to mount it as the iron steed. That here, as throughout the series, the degree of confusion depends upon the depth—momentary and temperamental—of the distraction may be taken for granted, and is definitely ascertainable in many cases; it is this dominant factor that, when written large, furnishes the clue to the more striking and the more