"In the first year of my stay at Paris I entered my name for the more advanced lectures of the Lycée L——. I only attended them for a week. In the class-room I was conscious of an uneasy feeling; I feared something without knowing what it was; I felt a horror of all the staff, though they were full of consideration for me, and at my age (twenty-two) I was no longer on the footing of a schoolboy. What could I have been afraid of? for I might have left whenever I wished it. Though accustomed to work for many hours together in libraries, I could do nothing in this class-room. I believe this state to have been a reminiscence of my old fear—that of the Bucharest _lycée_.... Long afterwards, when a student attending the lectures of the Faculté de Droit, I had every day to pass the Lycée L——. I would hurry past it as quickly as I could, feeling the same dread as at the time when I used to pass the gateway of the Bucharest _lycée_. “I have a good motor, no visual, and a very slight auditory memory.” It might be said that in this case the revival is often artificially produced, and associated with special circumstances; but it seemed to me of too clear and definite a character to be omitted. I need not point out that these individual differences in the revivability of emotional states certainly play a great part in the constitution of different types of character. Moreover, the existence of variations of the emotional type cuts short the question, acrimoniously debated by some writers, whether pains can be more easily remembered than pleasures. Optimists and pessimists have fought fiercely over this phantasmal problem; but it is a vain and factitious question so long as we suppose that it admits of but one solution. There is not, and cannot be, a general answer. Certain individuals revive joyful images with astonishing facility; sad memories, when they arise, are immediately and easily trodden down. I know an inveterate optimist, successful in all his undertakings, who has much difficulty in picturing to himself the few reverses that he has experienced. “I remember joys much more easily than painful states” is an answer I frequently meet with in my notes. On the other hand, there are many who say, “I remember sorrows much more easily than pleasurable states.” In the course of my inquiries I have found that the latter are the most numerous; but I do not see my way to draw any conclusion from this fact. One says, “I find it much easier to revive unpleasant feelings, whence my tendency to pessimism. Joyous impressions are evanescent. A painful recollection makes me sad at a joyful moment; a joyful recollection does not cheer me at a sad one.” These are straightforward cases. Outside them the question above stated can only be solved at haphazard, and by a merely mental view.