THE LAPSES OF CONSCIOUSNESS. 485 



The simplest type of subconscious motor response consists in carry- 

 ing out a more or less suitable and habitual action, while remaining 

 unaware of its accomplishment — a lapse, accordingly, not of per- 

 formance, but of notification of the accomplished service to the con- 

 scious self. A. proceeds to wind his watch at a certain stage of his 

 undressing to find it already wound through subconscious habit; B., 

 already retired for the night, leaves his bed to lock the door and finds 

 it securely fastened, and doubtless by his unobservant self ; C, working 

 at his desk on a warm summer's day, decides to remove his coat and 

 finds he has already done so; D. looks about distractedly for a particular 

 shirt and finds it on his own person under the one he had decided to 

 discard; E., a clergyman, sends out the contribution plate a second 

 time, much to the consternation of the congregation ; F., a railway em- 

 ployee, changes the position of a switch, unaware that he has already 

 reversed it, and wrecks a train: and so on with considerable variation 

 of scene, plot and dramatis persona. Let me note again that these 

 instances involve a weakened sensory apperception, inasmuch as the 

 second action is initiated because the first performance was so feebly 

 attended to, so distractedly appreciated. Doubtless, more frequently 

 than the complete dropping of the link out of consciousness is the doubt, 

 the query, whether one really has wound the clock, or locked the door, 

 or put out the lights, or posted the letters, or taken one's medicine, or 

 even eaten one's lunch; and one proceeds to verify by actual examina- 

 tion or by some definite memory-clue that it has been done.* 



I must give at least one instance of this memory-clue and its mode 

 of working. A student, in this case a married student, had been en- 

 trusted to attend to some domestic commissions on his way to the uni- 

 versity. Suddenly, in seeing the word ' business ' in the course of his 

 work, it flashed across his mind that he had forgotten the commissions ; 

 yet he was not sure. In trying to recall whether he had made the pur- 

 chases or not, there clearly echoed in his mind the sound of the squeak 

 of the door in leaving the shop. This sensory impression was his surest 

 indication, and proved to be a reliable one, that he had entered the 



not yet sufficiently recovered to bear one's weight; after operations to one's 

 teeth, one unintentionally disobeys the dentist's injunction not to eat on that 

 side for a day or two. A more complex instance of a lapse of this type is 

 that of a young man who has just had an injection of belladonna put into 

 his eyes, and who on his way home stops to buy a paper, choses the one he 

 wishes, and is quite unmindful of the fact that he will be unable to read it. 

 * The complementary memory failure occurs when one is quite certain 

 that one of these habitual tasks has been done, and is confronted with con- 

 clusive evidence that it has not. It is the slight claim that the performance 

 thereof has to our conscious attention that makes possible each kind of failure. 

 It is not so much as lapses of memory, but as inattentive occupations that 

 the instances are here apposite ; and it is this aspect of them that makes proper 

 their citation as motor lapses. 



