It has happened that other thinkers outside the field of medicine have disclosed by an observation the meaning of some error and so anticipated our efforts in this direction. You all know the witty satirist Lichtenberg (1742–1799) of whom Goethe said: “Where he makes a joke, a problem lies concealed.” And occasionally the solution of the problem is revealed in the joke. Lichtenberg writes in his witty and satirical _Notes_, “He always read ‘Agamemnon’ for ‘angenommen’ (verb meaning ‘to take for granted’), so deeply versed was he in Homer.” This really contains the whole theory of slips in reading. At the next lecture we will see whether we can agree with the poets in their conception of the meaning of psychological errors. THIRD LECTURE THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ERRORS (_continuation_) At the last lecture it occurred to us to consider the error by itself alone, apart from its relation to the intended act with which it had interfered, and we perceived that in certain cases it seemed to betray a meaning of its own. We said to ourselves that if this conclusion, that the error has its own meaning, could be established on a larger scale, that meaning would soon prove more interesting to us than the investigation of the conditions under which errors arise. Let us once more agree upon what we understand by the “meaning” of a mental process. This is nothing else but the intention which it serves and its place in a mental sequence. In most of the cases we examined we could substitute for the word “meaning” the words “intention” and “tendency.” Now was it only a deceptive appearance, or a poetic glorification of the error, that led us to believe that we could see an intention in it? Let us still keep to the examples of slips of the tongue and review a larger number of such manifestations. We then find whole categories of cases in which the intention, the meaning, of the slip is quite obvious, particularly so in those instances in which the opposite of what was intended is said. The President says in his opening speech: “I declare the session _closed_.” That is surely not ambiguous. The meaning and intention of this slip is that he wants to close the session. One might well say, “he said so himself”; we only take him at his word. Please do not interrupt me with the objection that this is impossible, that we know quite well that he wished to open the session, not to close it, and that he himself whom we have just recognized as the best judge of his intention will affirm that he meant to open it. In doing so you forget that we agreed to consider the error by itself; its relation to the intention which it disturbs will be discussed later. _You_ would be guilty of an error in logic, by which you would conveniently dispose of the whole problem under discussion, which in English is called “begging the question.”