A man at the Century Club was falling foul of me the other night for my
use of the word “memory.” There was no such thing, he said, as
“unconscious memory”—memory was always conscious, and so forth. My
business is—and I think it can be easily done—to show that they cannot
beat me off my unconscious memory without my being able to beat them off
their conscious memory; that they cannot deny the legitimacy of my
maintaining the phenomena of heredity to be phenomena of memory without
my being able to deny the legitimacy of their maintaining the
recollection of what they had for dinner yesterday to be a phenomenon of
memory. My theory of the unconscious does not lead to universal
unconsciousness, but only to pigeon-holing and putting by. We shall
always get new things to worry about. If I thought that by learning more
and more I should ever arrive at the knowledge of absolute truth, I would
leave off studying. But I believe I am pretty safe.