Unconscious Memory

Where do memories go when they are not in consciousness? Samuel Butler, better known for his novels Erewhon and The Way of All Flesh, bases this book on concepts including memory as a universal function of organised matter while he questions where memories live. Butler believes instinct is inherited memory and in Unconscious Memory, he restates the argument that human progress is due to ‘strokes of cunning – to a sense of need, and to study of the past and present which have given shrewd people a key with which to unlock the chambers of the future’.