=Irresistible Childhood.= An experience that is forgotten is not necessarily lost.  Although the first few years of childhood are lost to conscious memory, these years outweigh all others in their influence on character.  The Jesuit priest was right when he said, “Give me a child until he is six years old, and he will be a Catholic all his life.”  As Frink has so ably shown, the determining factors that enter into any adult choice, such as the choice of the Catholic or the Protestant faith, are in a large measure made up of subconscious memories from early childhood, forgotten memories of Sunday-school and church, of lessons at home or passages in books,—­experiences which no voluntary effort could recall, but which still live unrecognized in our mature judgments and beliefs.  Naturally we do not acknowledge these subconscious motives.  We like to believe that all our decisions are based on reason, and so we invent plausible arguments for our attitudes and our actions, arguments which we ourselves implicitly believe.  This process of substituting a plausible reason for a subconscious one is known as rationalization, a process which every one of us engages in many times a day.

It is indeed true that the child is father to the man.  Those first impressionable years, when we believed implicitly whatever any one told us and when through ignorance we reacted emotionally to ordinary experiences, are molding us still, making us the men and women we are to-day, coloring with childish ideas many of the attitudes of our supposedly reasoning life.  Bergson says: 

The unconscious is our historical past.  In reality the past is preserved automatically.  In its entirety probably it follows us at every instant; all that we have felt, thought and willed from our earliest infancy is there, leaning over the present which is about to join it, pressing against the portals of consciousness that would fain leave it outside.

=Spontaneous Outbursts.= “How do we know all this?” some one says.  “What is the evidence for these sweeping statements?  If we cannot remember, how can we discover these strange memories that are so powerful but so elusive?  If they are below the level of consciousness, are they not, in the very nature of the case, forever hidden from view, in the sphere of the occult rather than that of science?”

The answer to these questions is determined by one important fact; the line between the conscious and subconscious minds does not always remain in the same place; the “threshold of consciousness” is sometimes displaced, automatically allowing these buried memories to come to the surface.  In sleep and delirium, in trance and hallucination, in hysteria and intoxication, the tables are turned; the restraining hand of the conscious mind is loosened and the submerged self comes forth with all its ancient memories.

It is a common experience to have a patient in delirium repeat long-forgotten verses or descriptions of events that the “real man” has lost entirely.  The renowned servant-girl, quoted by Hudson, who in delirium recited passage after passage of Hebrew, Latin, and Greek, which she had heard her one-time master repeat in his study, is typical of many such instances.[20]