When we recall that Buckle, who was a free thinker in religious matters, still clung to the idea of immortality of the soul because he could not tolerate the thought of never meeting his dead mother; when we remember that scientists like Wallace and Fiske, who were among the pioneers of the theory of evolution, finally embraced spiritualism as a compensation for their lost faith in religion, it should not appear fantastic to trace Hearn's views on unconscious inherited memory and on the Buddhistic conception of Metempsychosis, to his loss of both his mother and his religion; for in his new belief he could meet his mother and still not sacrifice his intellect to his belief. Psychoanalysis might be applied to other phases of Hearn's writings,--his interest in the gruesome and exotic. It can explain his interest in other races like the coloured people and the Japanese; his passion for physical beauty and his shyness. One thing that impresses the lover of Hearn is the seeming impersonality of his work. Yet though he says little of himself directly, you can see the sensitive, half-blind sufferer throughout the work. For his ideas studied and traced to their source reveal of themselves the reasons why he embraced them. He has described ideal love, such no doubt as he must have felt, in _Karma_ in _Lippincott's Magazine_, May, 1890. This story has been only recently published in book form. His affinity for Poe and his adoption of the name The Raven in his letters to Mr. Watkins is seen in the projecting of himself upon that unhappy genius with whom he had so much in common. He, like Poe, suffered from poverty, from following aristocratic traditions in intellectual pursuit, in a devotion to physical beauty, in a love for French literature, in an interest in extreme suffering, in the divesting of art from morals and in wandering about from city to city. CHAPTER XVIII CONCLUSION I The question now arises, What effect will a knowledge of the author's unconscious have in making us appreciate his work as literature? Does it matter at all if we know whether a particular affair or a certain woman inspired a poem or not? Many critics protest against the kind of literary criticism that speculates as to whether the heroines celebrated in the sonnets of Shakespeare or Sidney were real or imaginary, whether the emotions felt by the poets were affected or genuine. These critics are not usually inclined to admit any connection between an author's life and his work.