On his desk lay a heap of envelopes containing the dispatches that had come from the news agency before his arrival at the newspaper office. These should already have been opened by an office boy, but that night he had been busy with something else. Mechanically, the editor himself tore open the envelopes, smoothed out their contents, and, without reading them, made a neat pile of the typewritten sheets, preparatory to going through them.
He had not been working an hour when he came to a dispatch, which he tossed aside, with the muttered comment, “That’s an old story, sure. I’ve read it somewhere before.”
Then, remembering the mistakes he had been making, he hesitated, picked it up, and read it carefully. Every word in it seemed familiar. But where could he have read it? In the evening papers? He went through them one by one, without result. Then it suddenly occurred to him that possibly, in opening the dispatches, he had, without being aware of it, glanced at this particular item, and had obtained a subconscious knowledge of it, which was now welling up confusedly as a conscious memory.
To test this theory, he directed the office boy to open the dispatches without fail for the next few nights. On none of these did he suffer from memory confusion.
Possibly, if he had analyzed the matter further, he would have found that the news items which had caught his eye while smoothing out the dispatch sheets related to subjects of some special interest to him. For just as one’s conscious attention is arrested by that which is particularly interesting, so does the subconscious select for presentation to the upper consciousness information of temporary or habitual interest and significance.
Sometimes, too, there is involved a harking back to interests of an earlier period of life. A simple but instructive illustration of this is found in a little incident that occurred to Doctor Richard Hodgson while on a visit to England. It may best be reported in his own words:[35]
“Yesterday morning (September 13, 1895), just after breakfast, I was strolling alone along one of the garden paths of Leckhampton House, Cambridge, repeating aloud to myself the verses of a poem. I became temporarily oblivious to my garden surroundings, and regained my consciousness of them suddenly, to find myself brought to a stand, in a stooping position, gazing intently at a five-leaved clover. On careful examination, I found about a dozen specimens of five-leaved clover, as well as several specimens of four-leaved clover, all of which probably came from the same root.
“Several years ago I was interested in getting extra-leaved clovers, but I have not for years made any active search for them, though occasionally my conscious attention, as I walked along, has been given to appearances of four-leaved clover, which proved, on examination, to be deceptive. The peculiarity of yesterday’s ‘find’ was that I discovered myself, with a sort of shock, standing still and stooping down, and afterward realized that a five-leaved clover was directly under my eyes.”
Compare with this an incident reported by an English clergyman, the Reverend P. H. Newnham. We find in it exactly the same element of selective subconscious attention, accompanied, however, by an auditory hallucination as a means of notifying the upper consciousness of the fact subconsciously observed.