486 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



shop and performed his errand. The instance is apposite in both 

 senses ; first, the occurrence of the word ' business ' arouses the dormant 

 association with the earlier, somewhat submerged conduct; and sec- 

 ondly, the attempt to explore in this submerged region proceeds by the 

 persistence of slight sensory impressions — faint afterglows — themselves 

 quite uncertain, and not intrinsically connected with the central and 

 important piece of conduct. As in retracing the more conscious links 

 of memory, so also in the case of the subconscious ones, there is a 

 tendency to reach the focus through some suggestive path from a dimly 

 lighted margin. 



Lapses of Confusion and Interchange. 

 Though this failure to make an impression upon the mental register 

 offers the simplest formula of a subconscious lapse, it does not present 

 the most common occurrence, presumably because it requires a somewhat 

 marked degree of absorption or absent-mindedness. The most frequent 

 type is that in which an action — usually partially inappropriate — is 

 performed under the impression that it is a different, an intended and 

 appropriate one. The first type is thus the suppression, obliteration, 

 or omission of a strand in the network, the second a partial substitution. 

 Here belong the many comedies of errors, trivial or embarrassing rather 

 than momentous, in the lighter scenes of life's dramas. Cases of going 

 off with a stranger's hat or cloak or umbrella or even his horse and car- 

 riage occur constantly, and furnish evidence that the absence of the 

 signs by which we ordinarily recognize our own may itself go unheeded. 

 The successful action of the process appears in the familiar feeling of 

 suddenly missing something, at first not a definite something — cane, 

 umbrella, parcel, book, shopping bag — which one has been carrying and 

 has forgotten at some absorbed point of the day's commissions. It 

 takes but a slight measure of distraction to submerge these superficial 

 impressions so that they fail to perform the service usually expected 

 of them. Lapses that intrinsically have the same status appear in 

 varied situations: students occasionally go to the wrong class room; 

 or find themselves on the way to the university on a Sunday; a college 

 girl appears ready for a social evening in toilette de bal with a ' history ' 

 note-book in hand ; an actress makes a hurried entrance upon the stage, 

 having snatched a whisk-broom as a fan ; a clerk, eating a hurried lunch 

 and eager to start on his bicycle upon an important errand, finds himself 

 carrying his chair out of doors, and making the initial movement to 

 mount it as the iron steed. That here, as throughout the series, the 

 degree of confusion depends upon the depth — momentary and tempera- 

 mental — of the distraction may be taken for granted, and is definitely 

 ascertainable in many cases; it is this dominant factor that, when 

 written large, furnishes the clue to the more striking and the more 



