Many of the views here presented will be strange and novel to those unacquainted with or hostile to Freud's theories, or to those who wish to ignore the fact of the existence of primitive emotions in man. The ideas advanced here will displease the puritanical opponents of scientific research. But it should be borne in mind that a study of the unconscious must necessarily deal with much that is obnoxious in human nature.[A] A study of this unpleasant element leads to the attainment of a more natural and moral life. But we should also remember that the unconscious, besides containing the seeds of crime and immorality, also is the soil of all those finer emotions that the church and the state cherish. Conscience, self-sacrifice, moral sense, love, are unconscious sentiments. I should have liked to treat of the literature of metempsychosis. In this literature where people are depicted as remembering past existences, as in Kipling's tale, _The Finest Story in the World_, George Sand's _Consuelo_, and Jack London's _The Star Rover_, there may be possible avenues to race memories. Needless to say, I do not believe in the transmigration of the individual soul as some of the Greeks and early Christians did. But the Buddhistic conception of metempsychosis with its doctrine of the Karma, the scientific theory of heredity, and the conception of psychoanalysis are all dominated by a similar idea; this is, that the manners of feeling and thinking of our progenitors are exercised by us. We carry their souls, not the individual, but the collective ones; we are the products of their sins and virtues; we have all the idiosyncrasies, mental make up, emotional tendencies, that they had; we have stamped on us our race, our nation, our religion. We cannot remember isolated events of past ages, but the effects of happenings then are registered in our nervous system. No one has done more than Hearn to show this, and he is, both because of his life and work, one of the fittest subjects for psychoanalytic study. The only possible rival he has is Edgar Allan Poe. If any one wishes to see an adroit application of the method of reading between the lines in a poem, let him read Lafcadio Hearn's interpretation of Browning's poem _A Light Woman_ in the _Appreciations of Poetry_. Hearn had probably never heard of Freud, but in his lecture to his class, he showed that the unconscious of the author and the character could be discovered by probing carefully into the literary work. Hearn tells in prose Browning's story of the young man who claimed that he stole his friend's mistress to save him, and on tiring of her pretended he had never loved her. Hearn shrewdly observes: