the motor speech route; thus all the inflowing associations which at once unite with any new sense impression are repressed. The further psychological mechanism permits of only two possible explanations: (1) The admission of the sense impression is received unconsciously (because of the increase of threshold stimulus), in the perceptive centre just below the threshold of consciousness, and consequently is not incorporated in the attention and conducted back to the speech route. It only reaches verbal expression through the intervention of the nearest associations, in our case through the dialect expression[23] for the object. (2) The sense impression is perceived consciously, but at the moment of its entrance into the speech route it reaches a territory whose excitability is diminished by the dispersion of attention. At this place the dialect word is substituted by association for the motor speech image, and it is uttered as such. In either case it is certain that it is the acoustic dispersed attention which fails to correct the error. Which of the two explanations is correct cannot be proved in this case; probably both approach the truth, for the dispersion of attention seems to be general, and in each case concerns more than one of the centres engaged in the act of reading aloud. In our case this phenomenon has a special value, for we have here a quite elementary automatic phenomenon. It may be called hysterical in so far as in this concrete case a state of exhaustion and intoxication, with its parallel manifestations, can be excluded. A healthy person only exceptionally allows himself to be so engaged by an object that he fails to correct the errors of a dispersed attention--those of the kind described. The frequency of these occurrences in the patient point to a considerable limitation of the field of consciousness, in so far as she can only master a relative minimum of elementary sensations flowing in at the same time. If we wish to describe more exactly the psychological state of the "psychic shady side," we might call it either a sleeping or a dream-state, according as passivity or activity predominated. There is, at all events, a pathological dream-state of very rudimentary extension and intensity and its genesis is spontaneous; dream-states arising spontaneously, with the production of automatisms, are generally regarded as hysterical on the whole. It must be pointed out that these instances of misreading occurred frequently in our subject, and that the term hysterical is employed in this sense; so far as we know, it is only on a foundation of hysterical constitution that spontaneous states of partial sleep or dreams occur frequently.