This much is certain, and is denied by no competent investigator:
whatever has been in your mind is there still, and it is possible to
find a way of tapping the buried memory. An old woman, delirious with
fever, begins to babble in a strange language, and it is discovered that
she is talking ancient Hebrew. The woman is entirely illiterate, and her
conscious memory knows no language but her own, her conscious mind has
no ideas beyond those of her domestic life and the gossip of the
village. But investigation is made, and it is discovered that when this
woman was a girl, she worked in the home of a Hebrew scholar, and heard
him reading aloud. She did not understand a word of what she heard, and
was not consciously listening to it; nevertheless, every syllable of it
had been stored away forever by her subconscious mind. Innumerable cases
of this sort have been established; and, as a matter of fact, we might
have been prepared for such discoveries by the memory-feats of the
conscious mind. It is well known that Mozart, when a child, could listen
to a new opera, and go home and play it over note for note. At present
there is a child in America, giving exhibitions in public, carrying on
thirty games of chess at the same time. There have been others who do
sums of mental arithmetic, such as multiplying thirty-two figures by
thirty-two figures, or reciting the Bible backwards.
All this seems incredible; and yet there is something still more
incredible. Suppose that these same powers, which are stored in our
subconscious minds, were stored also in the minds of animals! A few
years ago Maurice Maeterlinck published a book, "The Unknown Guest," in
the course of which he tells about his experiments with the so-called
Elberfeld horses: two animals which had been trained for years by their
owner to give signals by moving their forefeet, and which apparently
could count and divide and multiply large sums, and extract square and
cube root, and spell out names, and recognize sounds, scents and colors,
and read time from the face of a watch. Of course, it is easy to say
that this is absurd, that the horses must have got some signals from
their trainer; but, as it happened, they would do their work in the
absence of their trainer; they would do it in the dark, or with a sack
over their heads, and the best scientific minds of Germany were unable
to suggest any test conditions which could not be met. There have been
many gigantic frauds in the world, and this may have been one of them;
on the other hand, there have been many new discoveries, and for my part
I will finish exploring the miracles of the subconscious mind of man,
before I presume to say that anything is impossible in the subconscious
mind of a horse or a dog. Also I will wait for some learned person to
explain to me how the subconscious minds of horses and dogs know enough
to build and repair their bones and teeth, so cleverly that modern
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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