TEE LAPSES OF CONSCIOUSNESS. 497 



preoccupation, and as they close the book, become aware that they do 

 not know the equivalent which they had actually found and read. 

 Just how extensive the loss of orientation becomes can not be deter- 

 mined by the nature of the error which it induces, but must be inferred 

 more intimately from the temperament and introspective account of 

 the subject thereof. The man who, suddenly fearful that he had for- 

 gotten his watch, hastily explores the outside of his pockets, fails to 

 feel the object of his search, and a moment later consults his time- 

 piece to see whether he has time to go back and get the forgotten watch, 

 may be regarded as suffering from a decided lapse of orientation suffi- 

 cient to becloud his rational habits. Yet the degree of objective con- 

 fusion involved in the following narrative is no greater than in many 

 others, though the context suggests a decided mental wandering. A 

 young lady, after the wear and tear of an amateur play, was returning 

 a helmet which she had borrowed as ' property/ and passing by a 

 laundry, entered, wrote her name on the package, asked when it would 

 be delivered, and was only ' brought to ' by the astonishment on the 

 clerk's face when a partial unwrapping revealed the nature of the 

 article. The same comment may be made upon this instance as well: 

 a young lady calling upon her friend to borrow a bicycle, found only her 

 brother at home. The latter was pleased to be of service, brought out 

 his sister's bicycle, inflated the tires, then took the trouser-guards from 

 his own bicycle, offered them, along with the machine — and realized 

 that explanation was hopeless. One also hardly needs the confession 

 of the subject of the following lapses that she is constantly losing her- 

 self, particularly under mental excitement, or apprehension, such as 

 examinations bring in their train. Knocking at her own door and 

 waiting for an answer, rubbing one foot against the other and saying, 

 1 Excuse me ' ; sitting in her room absorbed in work, and realizing the 

 passing of muffled steps outside the door (such as made by rubber heels 



which she herself wears), she mentally comments, 'There goes 



— '■ — ,' meaning herself — such are the tales laid at her door, which in 



substance are acknowledged.* Here the condition approaches that of 



* It may not be out of place to note again that the type of action here 

 illustrated is just as apposite whether it leads to an inappropriate issue and 

 thus figures as a lapse, or whether the subconscious mechanism correctly 

 carries the action through to its normal result. The same degree of abstraction 

 that is needed for these pronounced lapses is perfectly comparable with equally 

 and even more pronounced activities correctly performed. I have the testi- 

 mony of a lady of domestic habits and decided literary tendencies who fre- 

 quently finds herself going through so prosaic an occupation as washing dishes 

 in a vague sort of way, quite surprised to find that she is through, and about 

 equally unable to retrace in memory the successive stages of her manual 

 labor and of her far-away thoughts. Indeed there is abundant evidence that 

 mental wandering occurs more frequently without leaving in its wake inter- 

 esting or recordable trace of its influence upon the waves of thought, than 

 it does thus aid the psychologist in the pursuit of his problems. 



