ROMANES' MENTAL EVOLUTION, ETC. 69 



Dr. Creighton insists chiefly on the importance of 

 change, which — though I did not notice his saying 

 so — he would doubtless see as a mode of cross- 

 fertilisation, fraught in all respects with the same 

 advantages as this, and requiring the same precautions 

 against abuse; he would not, however, I am sure, 

 deny that there could be no fertility of good result 

 if too wide a cross were attempted, so that I may 

 claim the weight of his authority as supporting both 

 the theory of an unconscious memory in general, and 

 the particular application of it to medicine which I 

 had ventured to suggest. 



" Has the word ' memory,' " he asks, " a real applica- 

 tion to unconscious organic phenomena, or do we use it 

 outside its ancient limits only in a figure of speech ? " 



"If I had thought," he continues later, "that 

 unconscious memory was no more than a metaphor, 

 and the detailed application of it to these various 

 forms of disease merely allegorical, I should still 

 have judged it not unprofitable to represent a some- 

 what hackneyed class of maladies in the light of a 

 parable. None of our faculties is more familiar to us 

 in its workings than the memory, and there is hardly 

 any force or power in nature which every one knows 

 so well as the force of habit. To say that a neurotic 

 subject is like a person with a retentive memory, or 

 that a diathesis gradually acquired is like an over- 

 mastering habit, is at all events to make comparisons 

 with things that we all understand. 



" For reasons given chiefly in the first chapter, I 

 conclude that retentiveness, with reproduction, is a 



