Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 67.djvu/500

494 with such lapses: looking for a handkerchief that is held in the hand, for a pipe that hangs in the mouth, for spectacles reposing on the forehead, for the umbrella grasped under the arm, for the pencil stuck behind the ear, for the package suspended from the hand—these are commonplace, usually of brief duration, but instructive, because of the attitude they present, the important query which they raise, in regard to how and why these sensations, usually sufficiently awarable, fail to qualify for consciousness. The moment of reentry into the conscious field is easier to detect than the manner thereof. The missing article that all along lay within the easy field of vision, seems suddenly to assume a familiarity that identifies it as the object of search; the vacant stare or bewildered reconnoitering is transformed into the intelligent look of recognition. The instances report little more than the fact that the handkerchief held in the hand, or the pipe in the mouth, or the umbrella under the arm, does suddenly yield the sensation of its presence. I have, however, one incident in which this realization was logically arrived at: the narrator was seeking his glasses which he had begun to use only a few months before; and, observing that he could clearly see the print before him, concluded that he must be wearing his glasses, which proved to be the fact. What is common to these cases is the peculiar and often unaccountable fluctuation in permeability of consciousness to definite types of stimuli. The failure or omission of perception—both when the mind is not particularly bent upon receiving the impression, and when such is the attitude—expands readily into an erroneous perception, a substitution; and naturally, similarity of observable characteristics favors such mistakes: and this, because of the general principle that minor fluctuations of attention occur more frequently than more pronounced ones, and of the further principle, that slight confusions, in which the confused objects present many common characteristics, require only a moderate relaxation of attentive oversight, while more serious lapses demand a more pronounced absentmindedness. Hats and umbrellas and gloves and overshoes and overcoats are the more readily interchanged because of their generic uniformity. The more variable and distinctive feminine bonnet does not lend itself to such subconscious borrowing. The whisk-broom that is hastily seized for a fan presents some slight tangible resemblance, though we pass quite beyond such resemblance when the chair is handled as a bicycle. Quite pertinent to this relation is the confusion