Freud has shown in his _Psychopathology of Every-Day Life_ that we tend to forget the things that are displeasing to us, that unconsciously we avoid what has once caused us pain. The objection has been raised to this theory that as a matter of fact it is the painful things that we never forget, and that these impress themselves most on us. Such critics might have taken it for granted that the scientist who laid down the principles that the neuroses date from the earliest painful love experiences which are never forgotten, but merely repressed and unconscious, would not have overlooked their objections. Certainly we do not forget painful things, but nature has so provided that we have a tendency to repress into our unconscious annoying events and go on our way as if they had never happened; only in symptomatic acts, mistakes, slips of the tongue and otherwise do we betray ourselves. The man whose wife has lied never forgets it if he has loved her. But if he has, let us say, been slighted by a person who has not been playing a principal part in his life, he will go on living as if that person had never existed for him. He may unconsciously avoid the street where that man lives, and forget about him, until some occasion may arise when he may betray his dislike of that person in a manner he never intended; the action is, nevertheless, the voice of his unconscious. Life would be unbearable if we always had before us pictures of our past sufferings. In fact, a neurosis is brought about by the fact that we don't forget. As Freud said, the hysteric suffers from reminiscences or fantasies based on painful events in the past. The principle of unconscious avoiding of the painful is at the basis of the rejection of the world's great books, both old and new. Literary criticism is influenced by our tendency to ignore what causes us pain. The world has not always realised the reason for the opposition to a new great thinker, or an advanced idea or book. We have contented ourselves by asserting that the world was not yet advanced enough intellectually to perceive their greatness. We know, however, that often the most intellectual people of an age are the first to reject a new idea. Men like Carlyle and Lord Beaconsfield would have nothing to do with the theory of evolution. Darwin's chief opponents were among the leading biologists of the time.