Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 67.djvu/502

496 of view by which to gauge the intercourse between the conscious and subconscious movements of thought. A student has mislaid her notebook, and after a thorough search fails to find it. The next day as the telephone bell rings, she instantly remembers where the missing book lies; for on the previous day just as she was preparing to go to the university, notebook in hand, the telephone bell had rung, and in answering the call she inadvertently had left her book upon the telephone-stand. While riding a bicycle, I turned a street corner rather abruptly and in doing so I caught a glimpse of two ladies, and mentally recognized one of them as Mrs. S. Upon overtaking them, I discovered that the other one was Mrs. S. The first, less conscious recognition had been referred to the wrong sensory stimulus. Quite similarly, a young man engaged in some absorbing occupation is asked to go to the cellar and bring up some coal; presently he returns with an armful of wood. He had been sufficiently attentive to appreciate that fuel was wanted, but a precise recognition was lacking. A young lady was busy reading, taking notes with pencil in hand, and presently emerged from a spell of abstraction to recognize that she was holding, not a pencil, but a pair of tweezers. Retracing her occupation, she was able to recall that in reading she had been passing her fingers over her face—a common habit—had come in contact with a superfluous hair, had reached for the tweezers, and in resuming a more attentive attitude towards her reading, became aware of her lapse.

Any further analysis of subconscious lapses, of their varieties and predisposing causes, requires a more intimate consideration of a factor to which repeated, and yet but casual, reference has been made—namely, the degree of abstraction that prevails, the remoteness of the action performed in the indirect field of attention from the focus thereof, or, it may be, the deviation in alertness of the faculties from their normal functioning. A certain intensity of concentration brings about a loss of orientation, a forgetfulness of self and surroundings; the regaining of which after such a moment of 'rapture,' 'brown study' sleep or anaesthesia is variously interesting. Naturally the more bizarre and inconsequential lapses demand such decided fluctuations of self-adjustment as occur commonly only in those by temperament predisposed thereto. It is quite prominent how frequently those who contribute such instances admit that they are frequently detected in absent-minded loss of self. The slight or incipient form of the defective adjustment to which the state leads, every one can appreciate from the common experience of consulting one's watch merely for one's own information, and yet being wholly unable a moment later to tell what is the time. Students look up foreign words in the dictionary in some similar mental