4 88- POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



conscious of a growing thirst, at length gets a match, then proceeds 

 to the fancet and finds himself applying the match to the running 

 water. Yet another interesting variation ensues when one or both of 

 the two commissions requires verbal expression. Then we may en- 

 counter such confusions as that of the young lady asking a post-office 

 clerk for ' individual salt-cellars/ or another demanding of a like 

 official some ' gray matter.' The astonished clerk may have guessed in 

 the first instance that the young lady had two commissions on her mind, 

 one for the article demanded and another for stamps, and had uttered 

 on the wrong occasion the request upon which her thoughts were bent ; 

 but he could hardly have surmised that the other was so occupied with 

 an approaching examination in physiology that ' postal card ' was in- 

 tended when 'gray matter' was spoken. The last is paralleled by a 

 third student who after a sleepless night asked his neighbor at the 

 breakfast table for the ' sleep ' when he wanted the ' cream.' There is 

 a combined linguistic and psychological interest in these verbal lapses 

 that entitles them to a more detailed consideration.* 



Lapses of Persistence: Conflict of Habits. 

 I shall refer to two other types of subconscious activities in which 

 the motor factors are prominent. One of these relates to the unin- 

 tentional resumption of discarded habits after a rather long period 

 of disuse. I have records of students trying to enter or actually enter- 

 ing rooms which they had occupied a term or several terms previously ; 

 and Professor James records that upon revisiting Paris after an ab- 

 sence of ten years, he found himself in the street in which he had 

 attended school, and in a brown study reached quite unintentionally the 

 door of the lodging several streets away in which in that earlier day 

 he had resided. I have records from other sources of men recently 

 married, returning to the parental home, momentarily oblivious of their 

 newer responsibilities; of retired business men finding themselves in 

 the train to the city quite without intent or definite purpose; and I 

 have other incidents that require more detailed description. A young 

 man had been employed as a conductor upon an interurban trolley line. 

 He gave up this employment in March and in August found himself 

 in the car on his old-time route. He entered the car tired and sleepy. 

 Suddenly looking out of the window, he recognized, in no very wide 

 awake condition, the point of the route at which it was customary to 

 collect the fares; and a moment later he had begun to collect them 

 and was ' ringing them up on the register,' when he realized the situa- 

 tion. Again, a young lady returns as a visitor to the boarding school 

 of her youth, sits down at the seat which she had formerly occupied, 



* Such consideration is given them in an appendix, entitled, ' The Lapses 

 of Speech,' to form part of the volume announced. 



