Page:B20442294.djvu/153

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TALENT AND MEMORY
125

female has precisely the remembrances she has. Some important conclusion may be expected from reflection on the incredible memory with which women recall all the adulation and flattery, all the proofs of gallantry, which have happened to them since childhood.

Whatever may be urged against the present complete limitation of the female memory to the sphere of sexuality and conjugal life, it is to me quite evident. Various arguments about girls' schools, and so forth, I am prepared for. These difficulties will have to be cleared away later. But I must just say again that all memory, which is to be used as a means of psychological definition of the individual, can include only the memory of what has been learnt when learning means actual experience.

The explanation of the discontinuity in the psychical life of women (reference to which is introduced here, only because it is a necessary psychological factor in the problem of memory, and without reference to its spiritualistic or idealistic significance) can be reached only when the nature of continuity is studied with reference to the deepest problems of philosophy and psychology.

As a proof of the fact I will at present quote nothing more than the statement of Lotze, which has so often caused astonishment, that women much more readily submit them- selves to new relationships and more easily accommodate themselves to them than men, in whom the parvenu can be seen much longer, whereas one might not be able to tell the peasant from the peeress, the woman brought up in poor surroundings from the patrician's daughter. Later on I shall deal more exhaustively with this subject.

At any rate, it will now be seen why (if neither vanity, desire for gossip, nor imitation drives them to it) only the better men write down recollections of their lives, and how I perceive in this a strong evidence of the connection between memory and giftedness. It is not as if every man of genius wished to write an autobiography: the incitement tp autobiography comes from special, very deep-seated psychological conditions. But on the other hand, the