LAPSES OF MEMORY.
_ANOTHER case is said to have occurred this week of one of those sudden lapses of memory which are some- times so bewildering when we consider the question as to
,how much of our memory is essential to our personal identity and how much is not. In the present case the lapse of memory was but a slight one. A woman named Kate Hickey applied to Mr. Bros at the Clerkenwell Police-court to help her to find the lodgings which she had engaged in the neigh- bourhood of Islington, and in which she had deposited her baggage after her arrival from the United States, but which she had, according to her own account, very imprudently
left without writing down the address, though she had paid in advance for a week. Of course, no one would dream of saying
that such a lapse of memory as this implied that in any sense
she had lost possession of herself, or bad to commence a new career, with something like a new personality, from the date
of that loss of luggage and of her temporary lodging in this world. But lapses of memory very much more serious and alarming in degree do occur from time to time in every country. In the United States there have been several within the last few gears exceedingly well authenticated, quite sudden, and singularly complete. The Society for Psychical Research has published the history of several cases in which a man has suddenly and totally forgotten his place in the world, his trade or profession, his family, his wife and children, and found himself homeless, cut off from his past, with just enough intelligence to earn his livelihood in a new, or partially new, calling, at a quite new starting-point in a distant Colony, to which he had found his way almost as a piece of drift-wood finds its way to a distant shore, and has been divided from his real past as completely as such a block is divided from the shore from which it has been carried by wind and tide. In several of these cases the return of memory has been as sudden as the lapse. After months, or even years, of a separate existence, the memory has suddenly returned of what he once was, while the memory of the intervening life has as suddenly disappeared. In the late Dr. Carpenter's "Mental Physiology " there is the full record of one such case, where the lapse of a woman's memory was due to the shock of having been very nearly drowned, the lapse of memory lasting for very nearly a year, though some partial traces of the old life began to show themselves a good deal earlier. In several other cases the lapse of memory was due to fever, and cut a man in two as it were, one series of fragments belonging to the history of the earlier life, and another series of fragments to that of the later life, which began after the attack of fever had left him. The later man remembered nothing that he had learned
in his earlier life, though in one case he had acquired a considerable amount of classical culture before his fever. In
every such case the sufferer had to begin again and acquire a new mental furniture from the date of his recovery from the fever, but after he had made a certain amount of progress in his second career such a sufferer would suddenly recover his earlier memory and lose the command of his later memory, so that he alternated as it were between the memory which began in his infancy and terminated with his fever, but of which the thread was again taken up after a certain interval from his fever, and the secondary memory which began after his fever, and threaded together all he had learned in his secondary states, but with a complete oblivion of all those intervals in which the earlier memory had returned.
Now in such cases as these,—and they are far too well established to admit of any real question of their genuine- nese,—it is not at all easy to say how far the per- sonality can be said to change with the change of memory from one set of experiences to the other. There are. indeed, a great number of very finely graduated degrees of lose of memory. Nothing is commoner, for instance, than in cases of severe accident to find that nothing whatever is remembered from some few minutes before the accident occurred till the end of many hours afterwards, so that there is a complete gap in the mental history of the victim, though Inly a brief one. Then, again, there is a case recorded by Dr. :'.ash. of Philadelphia, and cited by the late Dr. Carpenter, in which a patient of the former's, when recovering from a fever, found that he could remember nothing of his old Latin scholarship, and who began to study Latin painfully again from the very rudiments, but who one day, while trying to
remember one of his new Latin lessons, suddenly found him- self again in possession of all the knowledge of which the fever had deprived him.
Moreover, the memory of every man and woman fails in relation to a large portion of their lives, and is in all of us very uncertain in its grasp even of the most important of the events of the past life. There is no one who cannot recall some instance of an abrupt and most embarrassing failure of memory, and no one who cannot recall the equally abrupt recovery of some lost trace of the past life. Hence the extreme cases in which any life is bisected as it were between two different series of personal recollections are but great exag- gerations of lapses of memory of which we all have some faint experience. We can most of us remember much better what occurred to us in connection with one person than what occurred to us in connection with another. There are com- parative blanks in most of our lives upon which we have to consult the memory of others rather than our own. And though in the exceptional case of either accident or disease some of these blanks are far more complete and even tragic than those of which ordinary men have any experience, there is no reason for saying that even the worst of them breaks the personality in two, unless these slighter discon- tinuities, of which we all have experience, may be also said to endanger the personal identity. There is hardly one of us who cannot point out some critical passage of his life of which he has scarcely any remembrance, though it may have had a very great influence on his whole life and destiny, and though it may even have required and called forth a great effort of will to bring it about. Does it follow that that effort of will has not entered into the ultimate ground of his personality even though he has more or less lost the history of it, and cannot restore it rightly to its place in his autobiography ? We should certainly reply in the negative. That which has really been identified with our personality by our individual volition is part of us, though we may have completely forgotten its precise relation to our former lives. Of coarse the people whose lives have been cut in two by an accident or a serious illness, and who have in this way lost all remembrance of their responsibility to those to whom they undertook serious obligations in their former existence, are in a far more painful position than it is at all possible for any ordinary man to be. And yet how many of us have partially forgotten what we owe to others with whom our relations have not been of the most vivid kind, and are, though to a very much less degree, partly insensible, as it were, of our responsibilities to them, in consequence of a partial loss of memory, though it may extend only to the rapid fading away of feelings and thoughts which ought to be keen and sharply outlined instead of faint and blurred. And if this be so, we are all more or less,—some more and some less,—responsible for what we have been, and have given others reason to believe that we should continue to be, those being most responsible whose memories are most keen and living, and those least so who seem to be given the least power of summing up their past in their present, and of carrying on their past and present into the planning of their future.
But though it follows from this view of the case that we ought not to regard all men as equally culpable for ignoring their past responsibilities, since all men are really and truly not equally able to realise what they have been in what they are, it does not follow at all that any of us are only responsible for what we can remember of our past. On the contrary, every act of the will passes into the character even though it be not recorded in the memory. Study the face and manner of any old man who has, as it is called, "lost his memory," and you will find that though, in conse- quence of that loss of memory, a good many faults re- vive, which, when he had the help of memory to recall their former development and moral consequences, he had been able almost totally to subdue, yet that those of his qualities which he had fully embodied in the daily and hourly action of his will, remain. And though he may be imperious, when, with the full activity of his memory at his disposal, he would have been gentle and considerate, yet he will shrink painfully from anything that he would have regarded as a stain upon his nature,—from cruelty, for instance, or from plain selfishness, and will so carry into his last years some of the highest habits of the years which have (for the time) dropped out of his memory. Indeed, in many of these cases of alternating
memory, though the patient shows no recollection at all of what he had been, he will embody a certain sameness of moral attitude in both the bisected periods of his life, except where conflicting passions (as, for instance, in more than one of the French cases) had gained the supremacy at different times of his life, one at one time and another at another, and then no doubt the different phases of char- acter seem to present us with inconsistent personalities. Undoubtedly, however, there is a certain moral continuity which is in a very considerable degree independent of memory, —in other words, a habit of the will which continues even when the story of its formation has been obliterated from the mind. We should say, indeed, that the general lesson of the lapses of memory, of which there have been gradually accumu- lated so many examples, is this, that while we should be ready to make every allowance for the loss of responsibility which is due, and must be due, to such lapses, we should never forget that deep in the character, below the memory, there remains a continuity of dispositions and of will which identifies the transformed personality, even in the subject of one of these most painful cases, with that of the same character before the link was broken by which its past and present would have been welded together.
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