From the Unconscious to the Conscious 



only the supernormal faculties, but also creative inspira- 

 tion, genius, and all that is essential in the intellect from 

 the psychic point of view, be for the most part inaccessible 

 and unknown ? Why, in a word, are they subconscious 

 and not conscious ? Once more this is impossible to 

 understand from the data of classical psychology. 



Basing his reasoning on these arguments, Myers had 

 no difficulty in demonstrating the impossibility of making 

 cryptopsychism a product of normal physiological evolu- 

 tion. There is, in fact, an absolute contradiction in 

 establishing the existence of faculties at once very 

 powerful and very useful, but at the same time mostly 

 unusable in the normal life of the individual. 



Let us now pass to cryptomnesia. 



This, as we have seen, seems to have an immense 

 power, a reach which seems limitless. It seems to 

 register faithfully everything which has come under our 

 senses, whether consciously or unknown to us, and to 

 r egister indelibly. 



Such a concept differs in toto from all the classical 

 concepts of memory. 



The ordinary memory is most precise when the fact 

 has forcibly arrested the attention and is also recent. 



If the fact registered by the memory is of little or 

 no importance to the individual, it soon disappears for 

 ever, unless it should chance to be retained by reason of 

 an association with more important ideas. Similarly if 

 the fact registered is distant in time, remembrance 

 becomes vague, and in the end disappears, often entirely. 

 This is a regular and normal sequence conformable to 

 all that physiology teaches. 



The impression produced on the brain is superficial 

 and ephemeral for states of consciousness of moderate 

 intensity, and even for more important states this 

 impression tends to disappear in time. Le Dantec 1 

 thus sums up his psychological theory of memory. 



1 Le Dantec : Le Diterminisme Biologique. 

 124 



