MEMORY. 681 



thus reach the paradoxical result that one condition of remembering is 

 that we should forget. Without totally forgetting a prodigious number 

 of states of consciousness, and momentarily forgetting a large number, 

 we could not remember at all. Oblivion, except in certain cases, is 

 thus no malady of memory, but a condition of its health and its 

 life." * 



There are many irregularities in the process of forget- 

 ting which are as yet unaccounted for. A thing forgotten 

 on one day will be remembered on the next. Something 

 we have made the most strenuous efforts to recall, but all 

 in vain, will, soon after we have given up the attempt, 

 saunter into the mind, as Emerson somewhere says, as in- 

 nocently as if it had never been sent for. Experiences of 

 bygone date will revive after years of absolute oblivion, 

 often as the result of some cerebral disease or accident 

 which seems to develop latent paths of association, as the 

 photographer's fluid develops the picture sleeping in the 

 collodion film. The oftenest quoted of these cases is Cole- 

 ridge's : 



" In a Roman Catholic town in Germany, a young woman, who 

 could neither read nor write, was seized with a fever, and was said 

 by the priests to be possessed of a devil, because she was heard talking 

 Latin, Greek, and Hebrew. Whole sheets of her ravings were written 

 out, and found to consist of sentences intelligible in themselves, but 

 having slight connection with each other. Of her Hebrew sayings, only 

 a few could be traced to the Bible, and most seemed to be in the Rab- 

 binical dialect. All trick was out of the question ; the woman was a 

 simple creature ; there was no doubt as to the fever. It was long be- 

 fore any explanation, save that of demoniacal possession, could be ob- 

 tained. At last the mystery was unveiled by a physician, who deter- 

 mined to trace back the girl's history, and who, after much trouble, 

 discovered that at the age of nine she had been charitably taken by an 

 old Protestant pastor, a great Hebrew scholar, in whose house she lived 

 till his death. On further inquiry it appeared to have been the old man's 

 custom for years to walk up and down a passage of his house into which 

 the kitchen opened, and to read to himself with a loud voice out of his 

 books. The books were ransacked, and among them were found sev- 

 eral of the Greek and Latin Fathers, together with a collection of Rab- 

 binical writings. In these works so many of the passages taken down 

 at the young woman's bedside were identified that there could be no 

 reasonable doubt as to their source." f 



* Th. Ribot, Les Maladies de la Memoire, p. 46. 



t Biographia Literaria, ed. 1847, i. 117 (quoted in Carpenter's Mental 

 Physiology, chapter x. which see for a number of other cases, all unfor 



