Shadworth Hodgson, _Time and Space_, p. 266; quoted by W. James, i. 572. Footnote 112: _Biographia Litteraria_, chap. vii. p. 61 (Bohn’s ed.); quoted by James, i. 572. ----- I shall insist no further on these generalities, as it will be more instructive to determine by means of a few details the influence of the emotional life on the memory. To this end I shall divide our study into two parts, the function of unconscious feeling, and that of the conscious feelings. I. It is not always easy to determine positively the degree in which unconscious feeling influences the memory in order to awaken it, or to connect ideas with one another. I have purposely employed the vague term “unconscious feeling” as prejudging nothing with regard to its nature. We may form any conception we like of it, either considering it as purely physiological or assigning to it a psychological character—that of a consciousness diminishing to infinity. Both these opinions have their partisans, but this does not matter as regards the following considerations. In this unconscious feeling I distinguish three strata, passing from the deepest upwards, from the more obscure to the less obscure. 1. Hereditary or ancestral unconsciousness. I mention this merely for the sake of completeness. It would consist in the influence of certain modes of feeling, inherited and fixed in a race, which might, without our knowing it, exercise some sway over our associations. Under this form, at least, it appears to me extremely hypothetical. Laycock[113] (1844), one of the founders of the physiology of the unconscious, attempts to explain by this means certain national and individual tastes; the Hungarians are supposed to like plains because these appeal to the ancestral recollection of the Mongolian steppes, their primæval home. Herbert Spencer, who, however, has not occupied himself much with the influence of sentiments on the association of ideas, says incidentally that, in the impression produced by a landscape, “along with the immediate sensations, there are partially excited the myriads of sensations that have been in time past received from objects such as those presented; further, there are also excited certain deeper, but now vague combinations of states which were organised in the race during barbarous times, when its pleasurable activities were chiefly among the woods and waters.”[114] Schneider assumes this ancestral revivification in every æsthetic perception. We shall return to this subject in Part II. The predatory tastes of primitive man would explain certain agreeable associations (_e.g._, the pleasure of constructing a bloodthirsty drama) which contrast with the habits of civilised man. ----- Footnote 113: _A Chapter on some Organic Laws of Personal and Ancestral Memory_, 1875. Footnote 114: _Principles of Psychology_, i., § 214. -----