Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 67.djvu/495

Rh and writes a letter. During the occupation she quite loses sense of time and condition, and having finished her writing, raises the desk to be confronted with the unfamiliar contents thereof. I have also from another source a tale—possibly mythical, but in regard to the individual concerned most plausible—of a mathematician who, bent upon the solution of an intricate problem while walking in the street, becomes aware of a black surface before him that suggests to his absorbed mind the familiar and convenient blackboard; he begins to chalk some formula upon it, when it moves off, for it is the back of a carriage that has been waiting for its occupant. In such wise do slumbering habits reassert themselves and take control of our actions when the attention is momentarily diverted; while the lapse is favored by the presence of a familiar external situation—one that arouses an easy, 'at home' kind of mood, one that may be responded to by the half-attention adequate to well-established bits of conduct.

A further indication of the readiness with which motor habits assert themselves in the absence of intentional initiative appears in instances in which such action persists and fails to recognize the new situation, or persists automatically by the mere inertia of a group of centers 'set' to a particular line of conduct. I have before me an anecdote that is quite as instructive, whether literally exact or not, relating that a tourist, reading the papers in a Berlin café, was repeatedly disturbed by men entering and tumbling violently over the door-sill. Seven times within an hour did the accident occur. His curiosity aroused, he made inquiries and found that these seven men were habitués of the place, gathering almost daily for a game of 'skat'; and further, that the worn-out door-sill had just been replaced by a new one, in the unexpected height of which lay the cause of the series of mishaps. Haec fabula docet that we cross an unaccustomed threshold with sufficient and yet not apparent attention to our going to guide ourselves with tentative steps safely over any slight irregularity that may be encountered; but that for the several entrances and exits, literal as well as figurative, that enter into our daily walks, we have ready a decidedly more subconscious, inattentive response that may in the event of meeting new conditions set pitfalls in our path. Ordinarily such motor habits are exercised to meet situations the factors whereof are or may be—in the early stages of the acquisition doubtless were—realized in terms of visual and other sensory recognitions. To illustrate: the seven companions each originally learned to enter the cafe with a step appropriate to the worn-out door-sill, and did this by noticing visually the position of the sill, quite as I have learned with very slight attention to strike the several keys of my typewriter, to release the carriage, reverse the ribbon, engage the paper and advance it, by originally noting consciously and attentively how these mechanisms are set in operation.