Yet even that would not indicate that they had become mental and thus subconscious at the time of the lecture. The so-called subconscious, which in reality is fully in consciousness but only unnoticed, easily shades over into that unconscious which is also in consciousness but dissociated from the idea of the own personality and thus somewhat split off from the interconnected mass of conscious contents. Wherever we meet such phenomena, we are in the field of the abnormal. The normal mental life is characterized by the connectedness of the contents. Yet even that holds true, of course, only if we think of those mental states which exist at one and the same instant in consciousness. As soon as we consider the succession of mental events, we cannot doubt that even normal experience shows breaks, lapses, and complete annihilation of that which a moment before was a real content in our consciousness. We may have looked at our watch and certainly had in glancing at the dial a conscious impression, but in the next moment we no longer know how late it is. The impression did not connect itself with our continuous personal experience, that is, with that chief group of our conscious contents which we associate with the perception of our personality. Under abnormal conditions of the brain, larger and larger parts of the completely conscious experience may thus be cut off from the continuity of conscious life. But to be in consciousness, and therefore to be not-subconscious, does not mean to be through memory ties connected with the idea of our own personality.