I suppose most people recognised something of themselves in the
story, reported in the papers the other day, about the man and his
watch. He was hurrying to the station when it occurred to him that
he had not got his watch on. So he took his watch out of his pocket
to see if he had time to run home and get it. I do not know how the
affair continued; but I like to think of him hurrying back, bursting
into his house, bouncing upstairs, feeling under his pillow for the
watch, finding it was not there, and creating a fine hubbub in his
family, before his little daughter remarks that it is in his pocket.
And of course he misses the train. We have all done this sort of
thing. A very grave and responsible man who sat in Parliament for
many years told me that he went up to his bedroom one evening to
change into evening-dress. And at the stage of undressing at which
the ceremony of winding up his watch usually occurred, he wound it
up, put it under his pillow--and got into bed. Happily, before he
had fallen asleep he remembered that he had come up, not to undress
for bed, but to dress for dinner.
I had an absurd experience of the kind myself not long ago. As
everyone knows, there are two tube-stations at Oxford Circus,
connected underground. I went down the lift at one station intending
to catch a train somewhere, and walked along the subway until I came
to a lift, into which a crowd of people were hurrying. I suppose my
mind was occupied with some affair, and the mere habit of joining any
crowd that is going into any lift swept me in on the tide. The
ticket-collector was too busy to check my ticket, and I duly found
myself out in the street again at the place from which I had started
before I realised what I had done. I have the less hesitation in
making this confession because few of us can have failed to have some
experience of the sort. Most of our actions are as automatic as the
functions of walking, or breathing, or masticating our food. They
have become so habitual that we do not have to think about doing
them. They perform themselves, as it were, without our help.
If it is your custom to lock up at night and put out the lights, you
do so quite mechanically, and if, having locked the sitting-room door
and reached the foot of the stairs, your mind chances to wake up and
inquire: "Now did you put the lights out?" and sends you back to make
sure, you never fail to find that the action has performed itself
without any conscious effort on your part. It used to be no uncommon
thing for my family to find the front-door securely bolted in broad
daylight. I was in those days always the last home at night, and,
having opened and closed the door, it was my custom to stoop down and
bolt it. If by chance I came in during the morning or afternoon the
process was faithfully performed. The habit of bolting the door had
become a part of the habit of unlocking it, and it needed a conscious
effort of the mind to break the sequence. Or to take another
example, anybody can walk asleep down his own stairs quite safely,
but if he woke up at the head of the stairs in the dark and began to
think how the stairs went on and how many there were, he would not be
able to get down them without feeling his way like a blind man.
And most of us, I suppose, know how easy it is to forget the most
familiar name when the mind wakes up and urgently asks for it. You
are talking, let us say, to Blessington when up comes Whorlow. You
know Whorlow as well as you know your own shadow, and if you met him
in the street in the ordinary way his name would be on your tongue as
naturally as your own. But now your mind interferes. It demands
Whorlow's name for the purposes of introduction on the
spot--instantly. The passive habit of thinking Whorlow when you see
Whorlow vanishes. Your active thought becomes engaged. It rushes
round in search of his name, and cannot find it, and you end by
mumbling something unintelligible. And probably Whorlow, who is a
little sensitive about his name, feels that you have deliberately
slighted him.
It is not difficult to credit the stories of the people who forget
their own names or their own telephone number. These things have
been committed to the automatic workings of the mind. Our active
thought is not concerned with them, and when we consciously think
about them they escape. As Samuel Butler says, we don't know a thing
until we have ceased to know that we know it. If we ask ourselves
whether we know it we are on the way to being lost. He takes the
case of the accomplished pianist who rattles off a nocturne of Chopin
or an impromptu of Schubert without a check or a mistake. The habit
of the thing acquired by infinite practice carries him on like the
wind. But let him be stopped in mid-flight, as it were, and then
begin to think about the notes, and he will flounder and hesitate
until the current of habit seizes him again and sweeps him to the
close. Anyone can provide illustrations out of his own experience.
I can spell Philippi as well as most if I take it at a rush, but if I
begin by asking myself how to spell it, I fancy I should get
entangled in the "l's" and "p's."
In the case of the man and his watch, we see this conflict of the
active and passive mind in its most elementary form. His conscious
thought is that he has forgotten his watch and that there is little
time to spare to get it. Is there enough time? In comes habit and
takes his watch out of his pocket to tell him how long it is before
the train starts. The action is so automatic that he does not
associate it with the subject of his disquietude. And there he
stands, looking at his watch to see if he has time to go home and get
it--a perpetual joke which we can all enjoy, none the less, perhaps
all the more, because we suspect that we all stand there with him.