DISEASES OF MEMORY 



AN ESSAY IN THE POSITIVE PSYCHOLOGY, 



By TH. RIBOT, 



Author of "Heredity," etc. 



Translated from the French bt WILLIAM HUNTINGTON SMITH. 



12mo. Cloth, Sl.SO. 



''Not merely to scientific, but to all thinking men, this volume will prove 

 intensely interesting."— iVew York Observer. 



"M. Ribot has bestowed the most painstaking attention upon his theme, 

 and numerous examples of the conditions considered greatly inci'ease the value 

 and interest ot the volume." — FhUadeljihia North American. 



" 'Memory,' says M. Ribot, ' is a general function of the nervous system. It 

 is based upon the faculty possessed by the nervous elements of conserving a 

 received modification and of forming associations.' And again: 'Memory Ih a 

 biological fact. A rich and extensive memory is not a collection of impressions, 

 but an acctimulation of dynamical associations, very stable and very responsive 

 to proper stimuli. . . . The brain is like a laboratory full of movement where 

 thousands of operations are going on all at once. Unconscious cerebration, not 

 being subject to restrictions of time, operating, so to speak, only in space, may 

 act in several directions at the same moment. Consciousness is the narrow gate 

 through which a very small part of all this work is able to reach us.' M. Ribot 

 tiius reduces diseases of memory to law, and his treatise is of extraordinary 

 i n te resV—P/iiladeljjhia Press. 



"The ireneral deductions reached by M. Ribot from the data here collected 

 are summed up in the formulation of a law of regression, based upon the phjfeio- 

 logical principle that "degeneration first afi"ects what has been most recently 

 formed,' and upon the psychological principle that ' the complex disappears 

 before the simple because it has not been repeated so often in experience.' 

 According to this law of regression, the loss of recollection in cases of general 

 dissoiution of the memory follows an invariable path, proceeding from recent 

 events to ideas in general, then to feelings, and lastly to acts. In the best- 

 known cases of partial dissolution or aphasia, forgetfulness follows the same 

 course, beginning with proper names, passing to common nouns, then to ad- 

 jectives and verbs, then to interjections, and lastly to gestures. M. Ribot sub- 

 mits that the exactitude of his laws of regression is verified in those rare cases 

 where proiiressive dissolution of the memory is followed by recovery, recollec- 

 tions being observed to return in an inverse order to that in which they dis- 

 appeared."— A^erf York Sun. 



"To the general reader the work is made entertaininir by many illustrations 

 connected with such names as Linnaeus, Newton, Sir Walter Scott, Horace Ver- 

 net, Gustave Dore, and many others." — Hanisburg Telegraph. 



"The whole subject is presented with a Frenchman's vivacity of style."— 

 Providence Journal. 



'"It is not too much to say that in no single work have so many cnrious 

 CJsas been brought together and interpreted in a scientific manner." — Boston 

 Evening Traveller. 



'' Specially interesting to the general reader." — Chicago Interior. 



For sale by all booksellers ; or sent by mail, post-paid, on receipt of 2 rice. 

 New York: D. APrLETON & CO., 1, 3, & 5 Bond Street. 



