68 Luck, or Cunning ? 
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 
results 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 ven- 
tured to suggest. 
“ Has the word ‘ memory,’ ”’ he asks, “‘ a real application 
to unconscious organic phenomena, or do we use it outside 
its ancient limits only in a figure of speech ? ” 
“Tf I had thought,” he continues later, “ that uncon- 
scious memory was no more than a metaphor, and the de- 
tailed application of it to these various forms of disease 
merely allegorical, I should still have judged it not un- 
profitable to represent a somewhat 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 single un- 
divided faculty throughout the whole of our life, whether 
mental or bodily, conscious or unconscious ; and I claim 
the description of a certain class of maladies according to 
the phraseology of memory and habit as a real description 
and not a figurative.” (p. 2.) 
As a natural consequence of the foregoing he regards 
“ alterative action’ as “ habit-breaking action.” 
As regards the organism’s being guided throughout its 
