70 



DISCOVERY 



must be accepted and the other rejected. The 

 probability is that both theories are valid, and that 

 neither in itself affords a complete explanation of the 

 facts of forRPtting. 



Having dealt broadly with forgetting, we must now 

 consider the second part of our problem ; How are 

 these lapsed memories (the things we can't remember 

 as distinct from those we merely don't at the moment 

 remember) to be brought back to'consciousness ? How 

 can Jekyll remember Hyde, and Hyde Jekyll ? — for 

 such cases of double personality are forms of amnesias 

 not unknown to science. How can the forgotten name 

 be again remembered ? If simple obliviscence were 

 the one universal law, then all mental impressions 

 would gradually fade away until they got beyond the 

 limit of recall, where they would for all practical 

 purposes disappear. But obliviscence is at least 

 partially counteracted by an opposing tendency 

 towards what I have elsewhere 'called Reminiscence ' — 

 a re-remcmbering of the forgotten. We attend a 

 concert and hear a catchy tune, but fail to recapture 

 it ne.xt day. But ultimately it comes back to us of 

 its own accord as it were, and we can sing it without 

 hesitation and without doubt. This is reminiscence. 

 Again, we try to recollect the name of an acquaintance, 

 but fail and give it up. In an hour or so, when we 

 are thinking about something else, the name we want 

 leaps unexpectedly into the mind. This, again, is 

 reminiscence, a process common enough among adults, 

 but commoner still among children. If a class of 

 children be given a limited time to learn by heart a 

 piece of poetry, it is found, by testing them, that on 

 the whole they remember more two days after they 

 have learnt it than they do immediately after learning 

 it. Lines that had eluded them at first come back to 

 them at last. As a final example of reminiscence, I 

 will suggest a significant experiment which the reader 

 may make upon himself. Let him select a clearly 

 defined part of his past life, such as a holiday he has 

 spent abroad, and let him jot down all the events of 

 that period that he can remember. If he then dis- 

 misses the matter from his mind, and after a day or two 

 tries to add to his notes, he will find that many of 

 the things which he had failed to recall on the first 

 occasion are now clearly remembered. And after 

 further periods of rest he will find himself remembering 

 more and more. And the same thing will happen if, 

 instead of a period of his own life, he selects a period 

 of history which he studied years ago, or a poem which 

 he once memorised, or a branch of science that he 

 once mastered. 



He will, in any case, realise the important fact that, 

 when one memory is called up from the depths of the 



' " Obliviscence and Reminiscence," The British Journal 

 ef Psychology. Monograph Supplement, No. 2. 



unconscious, it tends to bring up other memories with 

 it ; when one idea recrosses the border-line that sepa- 

 rates the recoverable from the irrecoverable, it tends 

 to pull across the border other ideas associated with 

 it ; and, given sufficient time, these other ideas will 

 one by .one come across. To start this crossing of 

 the border we must, of course, begin with ideas that lie 

 on the conscious side of the hne. These experiments 

 force us to the conviction that the association links 

 that bind our experiences together still exist after the 

 experiences themselves have sunk into the unconscious. 

 This is the basal fact upon which the psycho-analysts 

 rely in their quest for that group of lost memories 

 which they call a " complex," and which they beUeve 

 to be the source of some neural and mental disturbance. 

 There is some difficulty in finding a suitable starting- 

 point ; but as Professor Pear pointed out in the 

 January number of this journal, the patient's dreams 

 supply a clue to the track that leads to the hidden 

 complex. 



Sir William Hamilton, many years ago, remarked 

 that it was probable that all our memories were 

 preserved, and that it was forgetting, and not remem- 

 bering, that called for explanation. And the view was 

 regarded as fantastic and quite unsupported by fact. 

 But in this, as in other things, the heterodoxy of 

 yesterday is fast becoming the orthodoxy of to-day. 

 For the number of amnesijis that have been cured, the 

 number of experiences, minute and detailed, that have 

 been gradually brought back from the limbo of the 

 past, the number of memories that have in certain 

 abnormal states been reproduced with almost phono- 

 graphic faithfulness, have led modern psychologists to 

 suspect that nothing that has ever been experienced is 

 really lost. Nay, it need not even be experienced. 

 Things seen or heard, but not noticed, Uke the multi- 

 tudinous pictures that fall upon the margin of the 

 retina, have been faithfully described by patients 

 during an hypnotic trance. 



I have but touched the fringe of a tremendous 

 subject, a subject full of undreamed-of possibilities 

 and teeming with unsolved problems. I have not 

 touched upon the theory of different levels and layers 

 of consciousness ; nor upon the way in which a 

 complex sometimes grows until it seems to form a 

 separate self which may gain the ascendancy over 

 the normal self, and give rise to alternating person- 

 aUties, as though two souls occupied the same body. 

 And the facts revealed give abundant scope for 

 metaphysical speculation. In this I will not indulge, 

 but merely remark that the term " integrity," as 

 applied to a man's chaiacter, takes on a fresh meaning ; 

 and that new light is perhaps thrown on the hne from 

 Wordsworth's ode : " Our birth is but a sleep and a 

 forgetting." 



