application of it to medicine which I had ventured 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?"

"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 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 undivided 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 development to
maturity by an unconscious memory, Dr. Creighton says that