No man, then, comes into this world without inheritance: he receives from his ancestors two goodly sets of heirlooms, the instincts and the mechanism which carries on bodily functions. This is the capital with which man starts life; but immediately he begins increasing this capital, adding memories from his own experience to the accumulated race-records. PERSONAL MEMORIES No more startling secret has been unearthed by science than the discovery of the length and minuteness of our memories. No matter how much one may think he has forgotten, the tablets of his mind are closely written with records of infinitesimal experiences, shadowy sensations, old happenings which the conscious self has lost entirely and would scarcely recognize as its own. Many of these brain records, or neurograms, as Prince calls them, are never aroused from their dormant conditions. But others, aroused by emotion or association of ideas, may after years of inactivity, come forth again either as conscious memories or as subconscious forces, or even as physiological memories,--bodily repetitions of the pains, palpitations, and tremors of old emotional experiences. =Irresistible Childhood.= An experience that is forgotten is not necessarily lost. Although the first few years of childhood are lost to conscious memory, these years outweigh all others in their influence on character. The Jesuit priest was right when he said, "Give me a child until he is six years old, and he will be a Catholic all his life." As Frink has so ably shown, the determining factors that enter into any adult choice, such as the choice of the Catholic or the Protestant faith, are in a large measure made up of subconscious memories from early childhood, forgotten memories of Sunday-school and church, of lessons at home or passages in books,--experiences which no voluntary effort could recall, but which still live unrecognized in our mature judgments and beliefs. Naturally we do not acknowledge these subconscious motives. We like to believe that all our decisions are based on reason, and so we invent plausible arguments for our attitudes and our actions, arguments which we ourselves implicitly believe. This process of substituting a plausible reason for a subconscious one is known as rationalization, a process which every one of us engages in many times a day. It is indeed true that the child is father to the man. Those first impressionable years, when we believed implicitly whatever any one told us and when through ignorance we reacted emotionally to ordinary experiences, are molding us still, making us the men and women we are to-day, coloring with childish ideas many of the attitudes of our supposedly reasoning life. Bergson says: