The Misuse of Mind | Page 8

it would seem "natural" to suppose destroyed, can, if the right methods are employed, be revived even with amazing fullness of detail.
In recent years since Bergson's books were first published, great strides have been made in the experimental investigation of the whole subject of memory, and the evidence thus obtained, far from upsetting the theory of memory suggested to him by the less extensive evidence which was available at the time when he wrote, lends it striking support.
It appears to be accepted by doctors who use hypnotism in psychotherapy that under hypnotism many patients can perfectly well be taken back in memory to any period of their lives which the doctor chooses to ask for, and can be made not only to remember vaguely a few incidents which occurred at the time but actually to re-live the whole period in the fullest possible detail, feeling over again with hallucinatory vividness all the emotions experienced at the time.
This re-living of past experience can, with some patients, be made to go on indefinitely, through the whole day, if the doctor has time to attend to it, every little incident being faithfully recalled though the actual event may have taken place 20 or 30 years previously. And this happens not simply in the case of some very striking event or great crisis which the patient has been through, indeed it is just the striking events that are often hardest to recover. Some doctors, in order to get at the crisis, have found it useful occasionally to put patients back through one birthday after another right back even as early as their second year, to see at what point in their lives some particular nervous symptom first appeared, and each successive birthday is lived through again in the utmost detail.[7]*
* See Psychology and Psychotherapy by Dr. William Brown.
Evidence of this kind does not, of course, prove that literally nothing is ever lost but it goes far towards upsetting the ordinary view that it is the rule for past experience to be annihilated and the exception for fragments here and there to be preserved in memory. The evidence which has so far been collected and which is rapidly accumulating at least seems to justify us in reversing this rule and saying rather that to be preserved is the rule for experience and to be lost would be the exception, if indeed any experience ever really is lost at all.
This way of regarding the field of memory is further supported by such evidence as has been collected with regard to the influence of past experience in dreams, phobias and various forms of insanity, but in these cases, of course, it is only isolated past experiences here and there whose activity can be observed, and so, while helping to upset the most natural assumption that whatever cannot be recalled by ordinary efforts of memory may be assumed to have been destroyed, they do not lend very much support to the wider view put forward by Bergson, that no experience, however trivial, is ever destroyed but that all of it is included in the field out of which memory makes its practical selection.
Taking all the evidence with regard to the preservation of past experience which is at present available, then, it is safe to say that, while it cannot, in the nature of things, absolutely prove Bergson's theory of knowledge, it in no way conflicts with it and even supports it, positively in the sense that the theory does fit the facts well enough to explain them (though it goes further than the actual facts and makes assumptions which can neither be proved nor disproved by an appeal to them) and negatively in the sense that what we now know about memory actually conflicts with the "natural" view that past experience which we are unable to recall has been destroyed, which is commonly appealed to to show the absurdity of the rival theory put forward by Bergson.
On the assumption which Bergson makes of a much wider field of direct knowledge than that which contains what we are accustomed to regard as the actual facts which we know directly, Bergson's problem becomes how to account for these facts being so much less than the whole field which we might have expected to have known. The answer, according to him, is to be found in our practical need of being prepared in advance for what is to come, at whatever sacrifice of direct knowledge of past and present facts. For practical purposes it is essential to use present and past facts as signs of what is coming so that we may be ready for it. To this end it is far more important to know the general laws according to which facts occur than to experience the facts themselves in