Illustrations of unconscious memory in disease : including a theory of alteratives / by Charles Creighton.

Date:
1886
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Illustrations of unconscious memory in disease : including a theory of alteratives / by Charles Creighton. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

    25/236 page 5
    tentiveness, commonly understood by the familiar names ' memory' and f recollection/ is essential, says Bain, to the operation of the two powers [the sense of difference and the sense of agreement] ; we could not discriminate two successive impressions if the first did not persist mentally to be contrasted with the second; and we could not identify a present feel- ing with one that had left no trace in our framework. But that which enters directly into our experience is an impression coming up again; memory, recollection, recalling, reproducing, is the fundamental fact of our mental acquisitions. Dependent upon it is consciousness itself; it is when an impression comes back variously discrimi- nated or identified under present suggestion that we are conscious. To use a favourite figure of speech, nearly all the impressions of our life and of the ancestral life are at any given moment behind the scenes; under some call of association, one steps forward and then another, and these play their part for a brief space on the stage. Our conscious life is the sum of these entrances and exits; behind the scenes, as we infer, there lies a vast reserve which we call the un- conscious, finding a name for it by the simple device of prefixing the negative particle. This vast reserve of the unconscious is the subject of the philosophical system of Hartmann. In the first volume of his work that author gives a systematic exposition of all that belongs to the sphere of the un- conscious—the ' Phaenomenologie des Unbewussten.'
    digitised image 1
    digitised image 2
    digitised image 3