The Note-Books of Samuel Butler

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.