496 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



of view by which to gauge the intercourse between the conscious and 

 subconscious movements of thought. A student has mislaid her note- 

 book, 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. Eetracing 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. 



Absent-Mindedness : The Temperamental Factor. 

 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 -adjust- 

 ment 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 



