126 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



dipping of the brush into the ink, the handling of a key taken from 

 the supposed stamp-box as though it were a postage stamp, the attempt 

 to thread a thimble) induced by moments of abstraction; while the 

 parallelism is completed when one or other of the commissions charged 

 upon the mind emerges into utterance at the wrong occasion, and the 

 preoccupied shopper asks the post-office clerk for individual salt-cellars 

 instead of stamps, because that item is next on her list of commissions. 

 A similar verbal interchange occurs when the absent-minded professor, 

 in writing a testimonial, records that " Mr. A. has attended my re- 

 markable lectures in chemistry with inorganic assiduity"; or asks at 

 the toy-shop " for a two-year-old book for an indestructible child." 7 

 One may experimentally induce these intrusions by giving the mind 

 two occupations, or exposing it to two sets of influences at the same 

 time. In writing on one topic while thinking of another, or while 

 listening to conversation, one may find in his written words some that 

 found origin in, or were altered by what he heard, or by what became 

 intruded into his writing from his extraneous meditations. A single 

 instance: a clerk writing a pass for an employee while engrossed in 

 the shipping of cylinders, writes From Lima to Cylinder instead of 

 From Lima to Dayton. It is a familiar experience for teachers, in 

 asking a question, with the answer prominent in consciousness, inad- 

 vertently to use the answer in framing the question. 



The intrusion of the subconscious thus becomes a widely available 

 formula to account for verbal as well as material slips of pen and 

 tongue and hand; and the tendency to such lapses takes one of several 

 distinctive forms, increasing with the similarity or suggestiveness of 

 the confused situations, and most of all dependent upon the way in 

 which the parts of the complex occupation lie in the mind, upon the 

 momentary diversion of the attention from the central occupation, and 

 everywhere upon the temperament and attentive habit of the subject. 

 In these aspects, both in their larger features and with unexpected 

 parallelism in detail, do the lapses of speech exhibit close analogies to 

 the more general failures of adjustment in conduct of various types, 

 that have in common with speech lapses the combined conscious and 

 subconscious expression of reflection and intent. 8 



7 1 can not extend the survey to take account of the distinctive lapses of 

 thought, which, in common with the lapses considered, involve the formulation 

 of a fairly definite thought that uncritically reaches expression in words, which 

 amusingly or significantly miss or distort the intention. Such is the reply of 

 the excited old soldier to the presentation of a sword upon an anniversary 

 occasion: 'This sword, gentlemen, is the proudest moment of my life.' A sur- 

 vey of such lapses of thought, for which (though not for these exclusively) we 

 have the special term ' bull,' would introduce more intricate yet related con- 

 siderations. 



s See ' The Lapses of Consciousness ' in the Popular Science Monthly for 

 October, 1905. 



