Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 67.djvu/494

488 conscious of a growing thirst, at length gets a match, then proceeds to the faucet and finds himself applying the match to the running water. Yet another interesting variation ensues when one or both of the two commissions requires verbal expression. Then we may encounter such confusions as that of the young lady asking a post-office clerk for 'individual salt-cellars' or another demanding of a like official some 'gray matter.' The astonished clerk may have guessed in the first instance that the young lady had two commissions on her mind, one for the article demanded and another for stamps, and had uttered on the wrong occasion the request upon which her thoughts were bent; but he could hardly have surmised that the other was so occupied with an approaching examination in physiology that 'postal card' was intended when 'gray matter' was spoken. The last is paralleled by a third student who after a sleepless night asked his neighbor at the breakfast table for the 'sleep' when he wanted the 'cream.' There is a combined linguistic and psychological interest in these verbal lapses that entitles them to a more detailed consideration.

I shall refer to two other types of subconscious activities in which the motor factors are prominent. One of these relates to the unintentional resumption of discarded habits after a rather long period of disuse. I have records of students trying to enter or actually entering rooms which they had occupied a term or several terms previously; and Professor James records that upon revisiting Paris after an absence of ten years, he found himself in the street in which he had attended school, and in a brown study reached quite unintentionally the door of the lodging several streets away in which in that earlier day he had resided. I have records from other sources of men recently married, returning to the parental home, momentarily oblivious of their newer responsibilities; of retired business men finding themselves in the train to the city quite without intent or definite purpose; and I have other incidents that require more detailed description. A young man had been employed as a conductor upon an interurban trolley line. He gave up this employment in March and in August found himself in the car on his old-time route. He entered the car tired and sleepy. Suddenly looking out of the window, he recognized, in no very wide awake condition, the point of the route at which it was customary to collect the fares; and a moment later he had begun to collect them and was 'ringing them up on the register,' when he realized the situation. Again, a young lady returns as a visitor to the boarding school of her youth, sits down at the seat which she had formerly occupied,