Psychology of Memory.

In order to understand the errors of memory, we must proceed, as in the case of illusions of perception, by examining a little into the nature of the normal or correct process.

An act of recollection is said by the psychologist to be purely representative in character, whereas perception is partly representative, partly preservative. To recall an object to the mind is to reconstruct the percept in the absence of a sense-impression.[112]

An act of memory is obviously distinguished from one of simple imagination by the presence of a conscious reference to the past. Every recollection is an immediate reapprehension of some past object or event. However vague this reference may be, it must be there to constitute the process one of recollection.

The every-day usages of language do not at first sight seem to consistently observe this distinction. When a boy says, "I remember my lesson," he appears to be thinking of the present only, and not referring to the past. In truth, however, there is a vague reference to the fact of retaining a piece of knowledge through a given interval of time.

Again, when a man says, "I recollect your face," this means, "Your face seems familiar to me." Here again, though there is no definite reference to the past, there is a vague and indefinite one.

It is plain from this definition that recollection is involved in all recognition or identification. Merely to be aware that I have seen a person before implies a minimum exercise of memory. Yet we may roughly distinguish the two actions of perception and recollection in the process of recognition. The mere recognition of an object does not imply the presence of a distinct representative or mnemonic image. In point of fact, in so far as recognition is assimilation, it cannot be said to imply a distinct act of memory at all. It is only when similarity is perceived amid difference, only when the accompaniments or surroundings of the object as previously seen, differencing it from the object as now seen, are brought up to the mind that we may be said distinctly to recall the past. And our state of mind in recognizing an object or person is commonly an alternation between these two acts of separating the mnemonic image from the percept and so recalling or recollecting the past, and fusing the image and the percept in what is specifically marked off as recognition.[113]

Although I have spoken of memory as a reinstatement in representative form of external experience, the term must be understood to include every revival of a past experience, whether external or internal, which is recognized as a revival. In a general way, the recallings of our internal feelings take place in close connection with the recollection of external circumstances or events, and so they may be regarded as largely conditioned by the laws of this second kind of reproduction.

The old conceptions of mind, which regarded every mental phenomenon as a manifestation of an occult spiritual substance, naturally led to the supposition that an act of recollection involves the continued, unbroken existence of the reproductive or mnemonic image in the hidden regions of the mind. To recollect is, according to this view, to draw the image out of the dark vaults of unconscious mind into the upper chamber of illumined consciousness.

Modern psychology recognizes no such pigeonhole apparatus in unconscious mind. On the purely psychical side, memory is nothing but an occasional reappearance of a past mental experience. And the sole mental conditions of this reappearance are to be found in the circumstances of the moment of the original experience and in those of the moment of the reappearance.

Among these are to be specially noted, first of all, the degree of impressiveness of the original experience, that is to say, the amount of interest it awakened and of attention it excited. The more impressive any experience, the greater the chances of its subsequent revival. Moreover, the absence of impressiveness in the original experience may be made good either by a repetition of the actual experience or, in the case of non-recurring experiences, by the fact of previous mnemonic revivals.

In the second place, the pre-existing mental states at the time of revival are essential conditions. It is now known that every recollection is determined by some link of association, that every mnemonic image presents itself in consciousness only when it has been preceded by some other mental state, presentative or representative, which is related to the image. This relation may be one of contiguity, that is to say, the original experiences may have occurred at the same time or in close succession; or one of similarity (partial and not amounting to identity), as where the sight of one place or person recalls that of another place or person. Finally, it is to be observed that recollection is often an act, in the full sense of that term, involving an effort of voluntary attention at the moment of revival.

Modern physiology has done much towards helping us to understand the nervous conditions of memory. The biologist regards memory as a special phase of a universal property of organic structure, namely, modifiability by the exercise of function, or the survival after any particular kind of activity of a disposition to act again in that particular way. The revival of a mental impression in the weaker form of an image is thus, on its physical side, due in part to this remaining functional disposition in the central nervous tracts concerned. And so, while on the psychical or subjective side we are unable to find anything permanent in memory, on the physical or objective side we do find such a permanent substratum.

With respect to the special conditions of mnemonic revival at any time, physiology is less explicit. In a general way, it informs us that such a reinstatement of the past is determined by the existence of certain connections between the nervous structures concerned in the reviving and revived mental elements. Thus, it is said that when the sound of a name calls up in the mind a visual image of a person seen some time since, it is because connections have been formed between particular regions and modes of activity of the auditory and the visual centres. And it is supposed that the existence of such connections is somehow due to the fact that the two regions acted simultaneously in the first instance, when the sight of the person was accompanied by the hearing of his name. In other words, the centres, as a whole, will tend to act at any future moment in the same complex way in which they have acted in past moments.

All this is valuable hypothesis so far as it goes, though it plainly leaves much unaccounted for. As to why this reinstatement of a total cerebral pulsation in consequence of the re-excitation of a portion of the same should be accompanied by the specific mode of consciousness which we call recollection of something past, it is perhaps unreasonable to ask of physiology any sort of explanation.[114]

Thus far as to the general or essential characteristics of memory on its mental and its bodily side. But what we commonly mean by memory is, on its psychical side at least, much more than this. We do not say that we properly recollect a thing unless we are able to refer it to some more or less clearly defined region of the past, and to localize it in the succession of experiences making up our mental image of the past. In other words, though we may speak of an imperfect kind of recollection where this definite reference is wanting, we mean by a perfect form of memory something which includes this reference.

Without entering just now upon a full analysis of what this reference to a particular region of the past means, I may observe that it takes place by help of an habitual retracing of the past, or certain portions of it, that is to say, a regressive movement of the imagination along the lines of our actual experience. Setting out from the present moment, I can move regressively to the preceding state of consciousness, to the penultimate, and so on. The fact that each distinct mental state is continuous with the preceding and the succeeding, and in a certain sense overlaps these, makes any portion of our experience essentially a succession of states of consciousness, involving some rudimentary idea of time. And thus, whether I anticipate a future event or recall a past one, my imagination, setting out from the present moment, constructs a sequence of experiences of which the one particularly dwelt on is the other term or boundary. And our idea of the position of this last in time, like that of an object in space, is one of a relation to our present position, and is determined by the length of the sequence of experiences thus run over by the imagination.[115] It may be added that since the imagination can much more easily follow the actual order of experience than conceive it as reversed, the retrospective act of memory naturally tends to complete itself by a return movement forwards from the remembered event to the present moment.

In practice this detailed retracing of successive moments of mental life is confined to very recent experiences. If I try to localize in time a remote event, I am content with placing it in relation to a series of prominent events or landmarks which serves me as a rough scheme of the past. The formation of such a mnemonic framework is largely due to the needs of social converse, which proceeds by help of a common standard of reference. This standard is supplied by those objective, that is to say, commonly experienced regularities of succession which constitute the natural and artificial divisions of the years, seasons, months, weeks, etc. The habit of recurring to these fixed divisional points of the past renders a return of imagination to any one of them more and more easy. A man has a definite idea of "a year ago" which the child wants, just because he has had so frequently to execute that vague regressive movement by which the idea arises. And though, as our actual point in time moves forward, the relative position of any given landmark is continually changing, the change easily adapts itself to that scheme of time-divisions which holds good for any present point.

Few of our recollections of remote events involve a definite reference to this system of landmarks. The recollections of early life are, in the case of most people, so far as they depend on individual memory, very vaguely and imperfectly localized. And many recent experiences which are said to be half forgotten, are not referred to any clearly assignable position in time. One may say that in average cases definite localization characterizes only such supremely interesting personal experiences as spontaneously recur again and again to the mind. For the rest it is confined to those facts and events of general interest to which our social habits lead us repeatedly to go back.[116]

The consciousness of personal identity is said to be bound up with memory. That is to say, I am conscious of a continuous permanent self under all the varying surface-play of the stream of consciousness, just because I can, by an act of recollection, bring together any two portions of this stream of experience, and so recognize the unbroken continuity of the whole. If this is so, it would seem to follow from the very fragmentary character of our recollections that our sense of identity is very incomplete. As we shall see presently, there is good reason to look upon, this consciousness of continuous personal existence as resting only in part on memory, and mainly on our independently formed representation of what has happened in the numberless and often huge lacunae of the past left by memory.

Having thus a rough idea of the mechanism of memory to guide us, we may be able to investigate the illusions incident to the process.

Illusions of Memory.

By an illusion of memory we are to understand a false recollection or a wrong reference of an idea to some region of the past. It might, perhaps, be roughly described as a wrong interpretation of a special kind of mental image, namely, what I have called a mnemonic image.

Mnemonic illusion is thus distinct from mere forgetfulness or imperfect memory. To forget or be doubtful about a past event is one thing; to seem to ourselves to remember it when we afterwards find that the fact was otherwise than we represented it in the apparent act of recollection is another thing. Indistinctness of recollection, or the decay of memory, is, as we shall soon see, an important co-operant condition of mnemonic illusion, but does not constitute it, any more than haziness of vision or disease of the visual organ, though highly favourable to optical illusion, can be said to constitute it.

We may conveniently proceed in our detailed examination of illusions of memory, by distinguishing between three facts which appear to be involved in every complete and accurate process of recollection. When I distinctly recall an event, I am immediately sure of three things: (1) that something did really happen to me; (2) that it happened in the way I now think; and (3) that it happened when it appears to have happened. I cannot be said to recall a past event unless I feel sure on each of these points. Thus, to be able to say that an event happened at a particular date, and yet unable to describe how it happened, means that I have a very incomplete recollection. The same is true when I can recall an event pretty distinctly, but fail to assign it its proper date. This being so, it follows that there are three possible openings, and only three, by which errors of memory may creep in. And, as a matter of fact, each of these openings will be found to let in one class of mnemonic illusion. Thus we have (1) false recollections, to which there correspond no real events of personal history; (2) others which misrepresent the manner of happening of the events; and (3) others which falsify the date of the events remembered.

It is obvious, from a mere glance at this threefold classification, that illusions of memory closely correspond to visual illusions. Thus, class (1) may be likened to the optical illusions known as subjective sensations of light, or ocular spectra. Here we can prove that there is nothing actually seen in the field of vision, and that the semblance of a visible object arises from quite another source than that of ordinary external light-stimulation, and by what may be called an accident. Similarly, in the case of the first class of mnemonic illusions, we shall find that there is nothing actually recollected, but that the mnemonic spectra or phantoms of recollected objects can be accounted for in quite another way. Such illusions come nearest to hallucinations in the region of memory.

Again, class (2) has its visual analogue in those optical illusions which depend on effects of haziness and of the action of refracting media interposed between the eye and the object; in which cases, though there is some real thing corresponding to the perception, this is seen in a highly defective, distorted, and misleading form. In like manner, we can say that the images of memory often get obscured, distorted, and otherwise altered when they have receded into the dim distance, and are looked back upon through a long space of intervening mental experience. Finally, class (3) has its visual counterpart in erroneous perceptions of distance, as when, for example, owing to the clearness of the mountain atmosphere and the absence of intervening objects, the side of the Jungfrau looks to the inexperienced tourist at Wengernalp hardly further than a stone's throw. It will be found that when our memory falsifies the date of an event, the error arises much in the same way as a visual miscalculation of distance.

This threefold division of illusions of memory is plainly a rather superficial one, and not based on distinctions of psychological nature or origin. In order to make our treatment of the subject scientific as well as popular, it will be necessary to introduce the distinction between the passive and the active factor under each head. It will be found, I think, without forcing the analogy too far, that here, as in the case of the illusions of perception and introspection, error is attributable now to misleading suggestion on the part of the mental content of the moment, now to a process of incorporating into this content a mental image not suggested by it, but existing independently.

If we are to proceed as we did in the case of the illusions of sense, and take up the lower stages of error first of all, we shall need to begin with the third class of errors, those of localization in time, or of what may be called mnemonic perspective. It has been already observed that the definite localization of a mnemonic image is only an occasional accompaniment of what is loosely called recollection. Hence, error as to the position of an event in the past chain of events would seem to involve the least degree of violation of the confidence which we are wont to repose in memory. After this, we may proceed to the discussion of the second class, which I may call distortions of the mnemonic picture. And, finally, we may deal with the most signal and palpable variety of error of memory, namely, the illusions which I have called mnemonic spectra.

Illusions of Perspective: A. Definite Localization.

In order to understand these errors of mnemonic perspective, we shall have to inquire more closely than we have yet done into the circumstances which customarily determine our idea of the degree of propinquity or of remoteness of a past event. And first of all, we will take the case of a complete act of recollection when the mind is able to travel back along an uninterrupted series of experiences to a definitely apprehended point. Here there would seem, at first sight, to be no room for error, since this movement of retrospective imagination may be said to involve a direct measurement of the distance, just as a sweep of the eye over the ground between a spectator and an object affords a direct measurement of the intervening space.

Modern science, however, tells us that this mode of measurement is by no means the simple and accurate process which it at first seems to be. In point of fact, there is something like a constant error in all such retrospective measurement. Vierordt has proved experimentally, by making a person try to reproduce the varying time-intervals between the strokes of the pendulum of a metronome, that when the interval is a very small one, we uniformly tend to exaggerate it in retrospection; when a large one, to regard it, on the contrary, as less than it actually was.[117]

A mere act of reflection will convince any one that when he tries to conceive a very small interval, say a quarter of a second, he is likely to make it too great. On the other hand, when we try to conceive a year, we do not fully grasp the whole extent of the duration. This is proved by the fact that merely by spending more time over the attempt, and so recalling a larger number of the details of the period, we very considerably enlarge our first estimate of the duration. And this leads to great discrepancies in the appreciation of the relative magnitudes of past sections of time. Thus, as Wundt observes, though in retrospect both a month and a year seem too short, the latter is relatively much more shortened than the former.[118]

The cause of this constant error in the mode of reproducing durations seems to be connected with the very nature of the reproductive act. It must be borne in mind that this act is itself, like the experience which it represents, a mental process, occupying time, and that consequently it may very possibly reflect its time-character on the resulting judgment. Thus, since it certainly takes more than a quarter of a second to pass in imagination from one impression to another, it may be that we tend to confound this duration with that which we try to represent. Similarly, the fact that in the act of reproductive imagination we under-estimate a longer interval between two impressions, say those of the slow beats of a colliery engine, may be accounted for by the supposition that the imagination tends to pass from the one impression to the succeeding one too rapidly.[119]

The gross misappreciation of duration of long periods of time, while it may illustrate the principle just touched on, clearly involves the effect of other and more powerful influences. A mere glance at what is in our mind when we recall such a period as a month or a year, shows that there is no clear concrete representation at all. Time, it has been often said, is known only so far as filled with concrete contents or conscious experiences, and a perfect imagination of any particular period of past time would involve a retracing of all the successive experiences which have gone to make up this section of our life. This, I need not say, never happens, both because, on the one hand, memory does not allow of a complete reproduction of any segment of our experience, and because, on the other hand, such an imaginative reproduction, even if possible, would clearly occupy as much time as the experience itself.[120]

When I call up an image of the year just closing, what really happens is a rapid movement of imagination over a series of prominent events, among which the succession of seasons probably occupies the foremost place, serving, as I have remarked, as a framework for my retrospective picture. Each of the events which I thus run over is really a long succession of shorter experiences, which, however, I do not separately represent to myself. My imaginative reproduction of such a period is thus essentially a greatly abbreviated and symbolic mode of representation. It by no means corresponds to the visual imagination of a large magnitude, say that of the length of sea horizon visible at any one moment, which is complete in an instant, and quite independent of a successive imagination of its parts or details. It is essentially a very fragmentary and defective numerical idea, in which, moreover, the real quantitative value of the units is altogether lost sight of.

Now, it seems to follow from this that there is something illusory in all our recallings of long periods of the past. It is by no means strictly correct to say that memory ever reinstates the past. It is more true to say that we see the past in retrospect as greatly foreshortened. Yet even this is hardly an accurate account of what takes place, since, when we look at an object foreshortened in perspective, we see enough to enable us imaginatively to reconstruct the actual size of the object, whereas in the case of time-perspective no such reconstruction is even indirectly possible.

It is to be added that this constant error in time-reproduction is greater in the case of remote periods than of near ones of the same length. Thus, the retrospective estimate of a duration far removed from the present, say the length of time passed at a particular school, is much more superficial and fragmentary than that of a recent corresponding period. So that the time-vista of the past is seen to answer pretty closely to a visible perspective in which the amount of apparent error due to foreshortening increases with the distance.

In practice, however, this defect in the imagination of duration leads to no error. Although, as a concrete image answering to some definite succession of experiences a year is a gross misrepresentation, as a general concept implying a collection of a certain number of similar successions of experience it is sufficiently exact. That is to say, though we cannot imagine the absolute duration of any such cycle of experience, we can, by the simple device of conceiving certain durations as multiples of others, perfectly well compare different periods of times, and so appreciate their relative magnitudes.

Leaving, then, this constant error in time-appreciation, we will pass to the variable and more palpable errors in the retrospective measurement of time. Each person's experience will have told him that in estimating the distance of a past event by a mere retrospective sense of duration, he is liable to extraordinary fluctuations of judgment. Sometimes when the clock strikes we are surprised at the rapidity of the hour. At other times the timepiece seems rather to have lagged behind its usual pace. And what is true of a short interval is still more true of longer intervals, as months and years. The understanding of these fluctuations will be promoted by our brief glance at the constant errors in retrospective time-appreciation.

And here it is necessary to distinguish between the sense of duration which we have during any period, and the retrospective sense which survives the period, for these do not necessarily agree. The former rests mainly on our prospective sense of time, whereas the latter must be altogether retrospective.[121]

Our estimate of time as it passes is commonly said to depend on the amount of consciousness which we are giving to the fact of its transition. Thus, when the mind is unoccupied and suffering from ennui, we feel time to move sluggishly. On the other hand, interesting employment, by diverting the thoughts from time, makes it appear to move at a more rapid pace. This fact is shown in the common expressions which we employ, such as "to kill time," and the German Langweile. Similarly, it is said that when we are eagerly anticipating an event, as the arrival of a friend, the mere fact of dwelling on the interval makes it appear to swell out.[122]

This view is correct in the main, and is seen, indeed, to follow from the great psychological principle that what we attend to exists for us more, has more reality, and so naturally seems greater than what we do not attend to. At the same time, this principle must be supplemented by another consideration. Suppose that I am very desirous that time should not pass quickly. If, for example, I am enjoying myself or indulging in idleness, and know that I have to be off to keep a not very agreeable engagement in a quarter of an hour, time will seem to pass too rapidly; and this not because my thoughts are diverted from the fact of its transition, for, on the contrary, they are reverting to it more than they usually do, but because my wish to lengthen the interval leads me to represent the unwelcome moment as further off than it actually is, in other words, to construct an ideal representation of the period in contrast with which the real duration looks miserably short.

Our estimate of duration, when it is over, depends less on this circumstance of having attended to its transition than on other considerations. Wundt, indeed, seems to think that the feeling accompanying the actual flow of time has no effect on the surviving subjective appreciation; but this must surely be an error, since our mental image of any period is determined by the character of its contents. Wundt says that when once a tedious waiting is over, it looks short because we instantly forget the feeling of tedium. My self-observation, as well as the interrogation of others, has satisfied me, on the contrary, that this feeling distinctly colours the retrospective appreciation. Thus, when waiting at a railway station for a belated train, I am distinctly aware that each quarter of an hour looks long, not only as it passes, but when it is over. In fact, I am disposed to express my feeling as one of disappointment that only so short an interval has passed since I last looked at my watch.

Nevertheless, I am ready to allow that, though a feeling of tedium, or the contrary feeling of irritation at the rapidity of time, will linger for an appreciable interval and colour the retrospective estimate of time, this backward view is chiefly determined by other considerations. As Wundt remarks, we have no sense of time's slowness during sleep, yet on waking we imagine that we have been dreaming for an immensely long period. This retrospective appreciation is determined by the number and the degree or intensity of the experiences, and, what comes very much to the same thing, by the amount of unlikeness, freshness, and discontinuity characterizing these experiences.

Time, as I have already hinted, is known under the form of a succession of different conscious experiences. Unbroken uniformity would give us no sense of time, because it would give us no conscious experience at all. Strictly speaking, there is no such thing as a perfectly uniform mental state extending through an appreciable duration. In looking at one and the same object, even in listening to one and the same tone, I am in no two successive fractions of a second in exactly the same state of mind. Slight alterations in the strength of the sensation,[123] in the degree or direction of attention, and in the composition of that penumbra of vague images which it calls up, occur at every distinguishable fraction of time.

This being so, it would seem to follow that the greater the number of clearly marked changes, and the more impressive and exciting these transitions, the fuller will be our sense of time. And this is borne out by individual reflection. When striking and deeply interesting events follow one another very rapidly, as when we are travelling, duration appears to swell out.

It is possible that such a succession of stirring experiences may beget a vague consciousness of time at each successive moment, and apart from retrospection, simply by force of the change. In other words, without our distinctly attending to time, a series of novel impressions might, by giving us the consciousness of change, make us dimly aware of the numerical richness of our experiences. But, however this be, there is no doubt that, in glancing back on such a succession of exciting transitions of mental condition, time appears to expand enormously, just as it does in looking back on our dream-experience, or that rapid series of intensified feelings which, according to De Quincey and others, is produced by certain narcotics.

The reason of this is plain. Such a type of successive experience offers to the retrospective imagination a large number of distinguishable points, and since this mode of estimating time depends, as we have seen, on the extent of the process of filling in, time will necessarily appear long in this case. On the other hand, when we have been engaged in very ordinary pursuits, in which few deeply interesting or exciting events have impressed themselves on memory, our retrospective picture will necessarily be very much of a blank, and consequently the duration of the period will seem to be short.

I observed that this retrospective appreciation of time depended on the degree of connection between the successive experiences. This condition is very much the same as the other just given, namely, the degree of uniformity of the experiences, since the more closely the successive stages of the experience are connected—as when, for example, we are going through our daily routine of work—the more quiet and unexciting will be the transition from each stage to its succeeding one. And on the other hand, all novelty of impression and exciting transition of experience clearly involves a want of connection. Wundt thinks the retrospective estimate of a connected series of experiences, such as those of our daily round of occupations, is defective just because the effort of attention, which precedes even an imaginative reproduction of an impression, so quickly accommodates itself in this case to each of the successive steps, whereas, when the experiences to be recalled are disconnected, the effort requires more time. In this way, the estimate of a past duration would be coloured by the sense of time accompanying the reproductive process itself. This may very likely be the case, yet I should be disposed to attach most importance to the number of distinguishable items of experience recalled.

Our representation of the position of a given event in the past is, as I have tried to show, determined by the movement of imagination in going back to it from the present. And this is the same thing as to say that it depends on our retrospective sense of the intervening space. That is to say, the sense of distance in time, as in space, is the recognition of a term to a movement. And just as the distance of an object will seem greater when there are many intervening objects affording points of measurement, than when there are none (as on the uniform surface of the sea), so the distance of an event will vary with the number of recognized intervening points.

The appreciation of the distance of an event in time does not, however, wholly depend on the character of this movement of imagination. Just as the apparent distance of a visible object depends inter alia on the distinctness of the retinal impression, so the apparent temporal remoteness of a past event depends in part on the degree of intensity and clearness of the mnemonic image. This is seen even in the case of those images which we are able distinctly to localize in the time-perspective. For a series of exciting experiences intervening between the present and a past event appears not only directly to add to our sense of distance by constituting an apparently long interval, but indirectly to add to it by giving an unusual degree of faintness to the recalled image. An event preceding some unusually stirring series of experiences gets thrust out of consciousness by the very engrossing nature of the new experiences, and so tends to grow more faint and ghost-like than it would otherwise have done.

The full force of this circumstance is best seen in the fact that a very recent event, bringing with it a deep mental shock and a rapid stirring of wide tracts of feeling and thought, may get to look old in a marvellously short space of time. An announcement of the loss of a dear friend, when sudden and deeply agitating, will seem remote even after an hour of such intense emotional experience. And the same twofold consideration probably explains the well-known fact that a year seems much shorter to the adult than to the child. The novel and comparatively exciting impressions of childhood tend to fill out time in retrospect, and also to throw back remote events into a dimly discernible region.

Now, this same circumstance, the degree of vividness or of faintness of the mnemonic image, is that which determines our idea of distance when the character of the intervening experiences produces no appreciable effect.[124] This is most strikingly illustrated in those imperfect kinds of recollection in which we are unable to definitely localize the mnemonic image. To the consideration of these we will now turn.

B. Indefinite Localization.

Speaking roughly and generally, we may say that the vividness of an image of memory decreases in proportion as the distance of the event increases. And this is the rule which we unconsciously apply in determining distance in time. Nevertheless, this rule gives us by no means an infallible criterion of distance. The very fact that different people so often dispute about the dates and the order of past events experienced in common, shows pretty plainly that images of the same age tend to arise in the mind with very unequal degrees of vividness.

Sometimes pictures of very remote incidents may suddenly present themselves to our minds with a singular degree of brightness and force. And when this is the case, there is a disposition to think of them as near. If the relations of the event to other events preceding and succeeding it are not remembered, this momentary illusion will persist. We have all heard persons exclaim, "It seems only yesterday," under the sense of nearness which accompanies a recollection of a remote event when vividly excited. The most familiar instance of such lively reproduction is the feeling which we experience on revisiting the scene of some memorable event. At such a time the past may return with something of the insistence of a present perceived reality. In passing from place to place, in talking with others, and in reading, we are liable to the sudden return by hidden paths of association of images of incidents that had long seemed forgotten, and when they thus start up fresh and vigorous, away from their proper surroundings, they invariably induce a feeling of the propinquity of the events.

In many cases we cannot say why these particular images, long buried in oblivion, should thus suddenly regain so much vitality. There seems, indeed, to be almost as much that is arbitrary and capricious in the selection by memory of its vivid images as in the selection of its images as a whole; and, this being so, it is plain that we are greatly exposed to the risk of illusion from this source.

There is an opposite effect in the case of recent occurrences that, for some reason or another, have left but a faint impression on the memory; though this fact is not, perhaps, so familiar as the other. I met a friend, we will suppose, a few days since at my club, and we exchanged a few words. My mind was somewhat preoccupied at the time, and the occurrence did not stamp itself on my recollection. To-day I meet him again, and he reminds me of a promise I made him at the time. His reminder suffices to restore a dim image of the incident, but the fact of its dimness leads to the illusion that it really happened much longer ago, and it is only on my friend's strong assurances, and on reasoning from other data that it must have occurred the day he mentions, that I am able to dismiss the illusion.

The most striking examples of the illusory effect of mere vividness, involving a complete detachment of the event from the prominent landmarks of the past, are afforded by public events which lie outside the narrower circle of our personal life, and which do not in the natural course of things become linked to any definitely localized points in the field of memory. These events may be very stirring and engrossing for the time, but in many cases they pass out of the mind just as suddenly as they entered it. We have no occasion to revert to them, and if by chance we are afterwards reminded of them, they are pretty certain to look too near, just because the fact of their having greatly interested us has served to render their images particularly vivid.

A curious instance of this illusory effect was supplied not long since by the case of the ex-detectives, the expiration of whose term of punishment (three years) served as an occasion for the newspapers to recall the event of their trial and conviction. The news that three years had elapsed since this well-remembered occurrence proved very startling to myself, and to a number of my friends, all of us agreeing that the event did not seem to be at more than a third of its real distance. More than one newspaper commented on the apparent rapidity of the time, and this shows pretty plainly that there was some cause at work, such as I have suggested, producing a common illusion.

I have treated of these illusions connected with the estimate of past time and the dating of past events as passive illusions, not involving any active predisposition on the part of the imagination. At the same time, it is possible that error in these matters may occasionally depend on a present condition of the feelings and the imagination. It seems plain that since the apparent degree of remoteness of an event not distinctly localized in the past varies inversely as the degree of vividness of the mnemonic image, any conscious concentration of mind on a recollection will tend to bring it too near. In this way, then, an illusory propinquity may be given to a recalled event through a mere desire to dwell on it, or even a capricious wish to deceive one's self.

When, for example, old friends come together and talk over the days of yore, there is a gradual reinstatement of seemingly lost experiences, which often partakes of the character of a semi-voluntary process of self-delusion. Through the cumulative effect of mutual reminder, incident after incident returns, adding something to the whole picture till it acquires a degree of completeness, coherence, and vividness that render it hardly distinguishable from a very recent experience. The process is like looking at a distant object through a field-glass. Mistiness disappears, fresh details come into view, till we seem to ourselves to be almost within reach of the object.

Where the mind habitually goes back to some painful circumstance under the impulse of a morbid disposition to nurse regret, this momentary illusion may become recurring, and amount to a partial confusion of the near and the remote in our experience. An injury long brooded on seems at length a thing that continually moves forward as we move; it always presents itself to our memories as a very recent event. In states of insanity brought on by some great shock, we see this morbid tendency to resuscitate the dead past fully developed, and remote events and circumstances becoming confused with present ones.

On the other hand, in more healthy states of mind there presents itself an exactly opposite tendency, namely, an impulse of the will to banish whatever when recalled gives pain to the furthest conceivable regions of the past. Thus, when we have lost something we cherished dearly, and the recollection of it brings fruitless longing, we instinctively seek to expel the recollection from our minds. The very feeling that what has been can never again be, seems to induce this idea of a vast remoteness of the vanished reality. When, moreover, the lost object was fitted to call forth the emotion of reverence, the impulse to magnify the remoteness of the loss may not improbably be reinforced by the circumstance that everything belonging to the distant past is fitted on that account to excite a feeling akin to reverence. So, again, any rupture in our mental development may lead us to exaggerate the distance of some past portion of our experience. When we have broken with our former selves, either in the way of worsening or bettering, we tend to project these further into the past.

It is only when the sting of the recollection is removed, when, for example, the calling up of the image of a lost friend is no longer accompanied with the bitterness of futile longing, that a healthy mind ventures to nourish recollections of such remote events and to view these as part of its recent experiences. In this case the mnemonic image becomes transformed into a kind of present emotional possession, an element of that idealized and sublimated portion of our experience with which all imaginative persons fill up the emptiness of their actual lives, and to which the poet is wont to give an objective embodiment in his verse.

Distortions of Memory.

It is now time to pass to the second group of illusions of memory, which, according to the analogy of visual errors, may be called atmospheric illusions. Here the degree of error is greater than in the case of illusions of time-perspective, since the very nature of the events or circumstances is misconceived. We do not recall the event as it happened, but see it in part only, and obscured, or bent and distorted as by a process of refraction. Indeed, this transformation of the past does closely correspond with the transformation of a visible object effected by intervening media. Our minds are such refracting media, and the past reappears to us not as it actually was when it was close to us, but in numerous ways altered and disguised by the intervening spaces of our conscious experience.

To begin with, what we call recollection is uniformly a process of softening the reality. When we appear to ourselves to realize events of the remote past, it is plain that our representation in a general way falls below the reality: the vividness, the intensity of our impressions disappears. More particularly, so far as our experiences are emotional, they tend thus to become toned down by the mere lapse of time and the imperfections of our reproductive power. That which we seem to see in the act of recollection is thus very different from the reality.

Not only is there this general deficiency in mnemonic representation, there are special deficiencies due to the fact of oblivescence. Our memories restore us only fragments of our past life. And just as objects seen imperfectly at a great distance may assume a shape quite unlike their real one, so an inadequate representation of a past event by memory often amounts to misrepresentation. When revisiting a place that we have not seen for many years, we are apt to find that our recollection of it consisted only of some insignificant details, which arranged themselves in our minds into something oddly unlike the actual scene. So, too, some accidental accompaniment of an incident in early life is preserved, as though it were the main feature, serving to give quite a false colouring to the whole occurrence.

It seems quite impossible to account for these particular survivals, they appear to be so capricious. When a little time has elapsed after an event, and the attendant circumstances fade away from memory, it is often difficult to say why we were impressed with it as we afterwards prove to have been. It is no doubt possible to see that many of the recollections of our childhood owe their vividness to the fact of the exceptional character of the events; but this cannot always be recognized. Some of them seem to our mature minds very oddly selected, although no doubt there are in every case good reasons, if we could only discover them, why those particular incidents rather than any others should have been retained.

The liability to error resulting from mere oblivescence and the arbitrary selection of mental images is seen most plainly, perhaps, in our subsequent representation and estimate of whole periods of early life. Our idea of any stage of our past history, as early childhood, or school days, is built up out of a few fragmentary intellectual relics which cannot be certainly known to answer to the most important and predominant experiences of the time. When, for example, we try to decide whether our school days were our happiest days, as is so often alleged, it is obvious that we are liable to fall into illusion through the inadequacy of memory to preserve characteristic or typical features, and none but these. We cannot easily recall the ordinary every-day level of feeling of a distant period of life, but rather think of exceptional moments of rejoicing or depression. The ordinary man's idea of the emotional experience of his school days is probably built up out of a few scrappy recollections of extraordinary and exciting events, such as unexpected holidays, success in the winning of prizes, famous "rows" with the masters, and so on.

Besides the impossibility of getting at the average and prevailing mental tone of a distant section of life, there is a special difficulty in determining the degree of happiness of the past, arising from the fact that our memory for pleasures and for pains may not be equally good. Most people, perhaps, can recall the enjoyments of the past much more vividly than the sufferings. On the other hand, there seem to be some who find the retention of the latter the easier of the two. This fact should not be forgotten in reading the narrative of early hardships which some recent autobiographies have given us.

Not only does our idea of the past become inexact by the mere decay and disappearance of essential features, it becomes positively incorrect through the gradual incorporation of elements that do not properly belong to it. Sometimes it is easy to see how these extraneous ideas get imported into our mental representation of a past event. Suppose, for example, that a man has lost a valuable scarf-pin. His wife suggests that a particular servant, whose reputation does not stand too high, has stolen it. When he afterwards recalls the loss, the chances are that he will confuse the fact with the conjecture attached to it, and say he remembers that this particular servant did steal the pin. Thus, the past activity of imagination serves to corrupt and partially falsify recollections that have a genuine basis of fact.

It is evident that this class of mnemonic illusions approximates in character to illusions of perception. When the imagination supplies the interpretation at the very time, and the mind reads this into the perceived object, the error is one of perception. When the addition is made afterwards, on reflecting upon the perception, the error is one of memory. The "fallacies of testimony" which depend on an adulteration of pure observation with inference and conjecture, as, for example, the inaccurate and wild statements of people respecting their experiences at spiritualist seances, while they illustrate the curious blending of both kinds of error, are probably much oftener illusions of memory than of perception.[125]

Although in many cases we can account to ourselves for this confusion of fact and imagination, in other cases it is difficult to see any close relation between the fact remembered and the foreign element imported into it. An idea of memory seems sometimes to lose its proper moorings, so to speak; to drift about helplessly among other ideas, and finally, by some chance, to hook itself on to one of these, as though it naturally belonged to it. Anybody who has had an opportunity of carefully testing the truthfulness of his recollection of some remote event in early life will have found how oddly extraneous elements become incorporated into the memorial picture. Incidents get put into wrong places, the wrong persons are introduced into a scene, and so on. Here again we may illustrate the mnemonic illusion by a visual one. When a tree standing before or behind a house and projecting above or to the side of it is not sharply distinguished from the latter, it may serve to give it a very odd appearance.

These confusions of the mental image may arise even when only a short interval has elapsed. In the case of many of the fleeting impressions that are only half recollected, this kind of error is very easy. Thus, for example, I may have lent a book to a friend last week. I really remember the act of lending it, but have forgotten the person. But I am not aware of this. The picture of memory has unknowingly to myself been filled up by this unconscious process of shifting and rearrangement, and the idea of another person has by some odd accident got substituted for that of the real borrower. If we could go deeply enough into the matter, we should, of course, be able to explain why this particular confusion arose. We might find, for example, that the two persons were associated in my mind by a link of resemblance, or that I had dealings with the other person about the same time. Similarly, when we manage to join an event to a wrong place, we may find that it is because we heard of the occurrence when staying at the particular locality, or in some other way had the image of the place closely associated in our minds with the event. But often we are wholly unable to explain the displacement.

So far I have been speaking of the passive processes by which the past comes to wear a new face to our imaginations. In these our present habits of feeling and thinking take no part; all is the work of the past, of the decay of memory, and the gradual confusion of images. This process of disorganization may be likened to the action of damp on some old manuscript, obliterating some parts, altering the appearance of others, and even dislocating certain portions. Besides this passive process of transformation, there is a more active one in which our present minds co-operate. In memory, as in perception and introspection, there is a process of preparation or preadjustment of mind, and here will be found room for what I had called active error. This may be illustrated by the operation of "interpreting" an old manuscript which has got partially obliterated, or of "restoring" a faded picture; in each of which operations error will be pretty sure to creep in through an importation of the restorer's own ideas into the relic of the past.

Just as when distant objects are seen mistily our imaginations come into play, leading us to fancy that we see something completely and distinctly, so when the images of memory become dim, our present imagination helps to restore them, putting a new patch into the old garment. If only there is some relic of the past event preserved, a bare suggestion of the way in which it may have happened will often suffice to produce the conviction that it actually did happen in this way. The suggestions that naturally arise in our minds at such times will bear the stamp of our present modes of experience and habits of thought. Hence, in trying to reconstruct the remote past, we are constantly in danger of importing our present selves into our past selves.

The kind of illusion of memory which thus depends on the spontaneous or independent activity of present imagination is strikingly illustrated in the curious cases of mistaken identity with which the proceedings of our law courts supply us from time to time. When a witness in good faith, but erroneously, affirms that a man is the same as an old acquaintance of his, we may feel sure that there is some striking point or points of similarity between the two persons. But this of itself would only partly account for the illusion, since we often see new faces that, by a number of curious points of affinity, call up in a tantalizing way old and familiar ones. What helps in this case to produce the illusion is the preconception that the present man is the witness's old friend. That is to say, his recollection is partly true, though largely false. He does really recall the similar feature, movement, or tone of voice; he only seems to himself to recall the rest of his friend's appearance; for, to speak correctly, he projects the present impression into the past, and constructs his friend's face out of elements supplied by the new one. Owing to this cause, an illusion of memory is apt to multiply itself, one man's assertion of what happened producing by contagion a counterfeit of memory's record in other minds.

I said just now that we tend to project our present modes of experience into the past. We paint our past in the hues of the present. Thus we imagine that things which impressed us in some remote period of life must answer to what is impressive in our present stage of mental development. For example, a person recalls a hill near the home of his childhood, and has the conviction that it was of great height. On revisiting the place he finds that the eminence is quite insignificant. How can we account for this? For one thing, it is to be observed that to his undeveloped childish muscles the climbing to the top meant a considerable expenditure of energy, to be followed by a sense of fatigue. The man remembers these feelings, and "unconsciously reasoning" by present experience, that is to say, by the amount of walking which would now produce this sense of fatigue, imagines that the height was vastly greater than it really was. Another reason is, of course, that a wider knowledge of mountains has resulted in a great alteration of the man's standard of height.

From this cause arises a tendency generally to exaggerate the impressions of early life. Youth is the period of novel effects, when all the world is fresh, and new and striking impressions crowd in thickly on the mind. Consequently, it takes much less to produce a given amount of mental excitation in childhood than in after-life. In looking back on this part of our history, we recall for the most part just those events and scenes which deeply stirred our minds by their strangeness, novelty, etc., and so impressed themselves on the tablet of our memory; and it is this sense of something out of the ordinary beat that gives the characteristic colour to our recollection. In other words, we remember something as wonderful, admirable, exceptionally delightful, and so on, rather than as a definitely imagined event. This being so, we unconsciously transform the past occurrence by reasoning from our present standard of what is impressive. Who has not felt an unpleasant disenchantment on revisiting some church, house, or park that seemed a wondrous paradise to his young eyes? All our feelings are capable of leading us into this kind of illusion. What seemed beautiful or awful to us as children, is now pictured in imagination as corresponding to what moves our mature minds to delight or awe. One cannot help wondering what we should think of our early heroes or heroines if we could see them again with our adult eyes exactly as they were.

While the past may thus take on an illusory hue through the very progress of our experience and our emotional life, it may become further transformed by a more conscious process, namely, the idealizing touch of a present feeling. The way in which the emotions of love, reverence, and so on, thus transform their lost objects is too well known to need illustration. Speaking generally, we may say that in healthy minds the play of these impulses of feeling results in a softening of the harsher features of the past, and in an idealization of its happier and brighter aspects. As Wordsworth says, we may assign to Memory a pencil—

"That, softening objects, sometimes even Outstrips the heart's demand;

"That smoothes foregone distress, the lines Of lingering care subdues, Long-vanished happiness refines, And clothes in brighter hues."[126]

Enough has now been said, perhaps, to show in how many ways our retrospective imagination transforms the actual events of our past life. So thoroughly, indeed, do the relics of this past get shaken together in new kaleidoscopic combinations, so much of the result of later experiences gets imported into our early years, that it may well be asked whether, if the record of our actual life were ever read out to us, we should be able to recognize it. It looks as though we could be sure of recalling only recent events with any degree of accuracy and completeness. As soon as they recede at any considerable distance from us, they are subject to a sort of atmospheric effect. Much grows indistinct and drops altogether out of sight, and what is still seen often takes a new and grotesquely unlike shape. More than this, the play of fancy, like the action of some refracting medium, bends and distorts the outlines of memory's objects, making them wholly unlike the originals.

Hallucinations of Memory.

We will now go on to the third class of mnemonic error, which I have called the spectra of memory, where there is not simply a transformation of the past event, but a complete imaginative creation of it. This class of error corresponds, as I have observed, to an hallucination in the region of sense-perception. And just as we distinguished between those hallucinations of sense which arise first of all through some peripherally caused subjective sensation, and those which want even this element of reality and depend altogether on the activity of imagination, so we may mark off two classes of mnemonic hallucination. The false recollection may correspond to something past—and to this extent be a recollection—though not to any objective fact, but only to a subjective representation of such a fact, as, for example, a dream. In this case the imitation of the mnemonic process may be very definite and complete. Or the false recollection may be wholly a retrojection of a present mental image, and so by no stretch of language be deserving of the name recollection.

It is doubtful whether by any effort of will a person could bring himself to regard a figment of his present imagination as representative of a past reality. Definite and complete hallucinations of this sort do not in normal circumstances arise. It seems necessary for a complete illusion of memory that there should be something past and recovered at the moment, though this may not be a real personal experience.[127] On the other hand, it is possible, as we shall presently see, under certain circumstances, to create out of present materials, and in a vague and indefinite shape, pure phantoms of past experience, that is to say, quasi-mnemonic images to which there correspond no past occurrences whatever.

All recollection, as we have seen, takes place by means of a present mental image which returns with a certain degree of vividness, and is instantaneously identified with some past event. In many cases this instinctive process of identification proves to be legitimate, for, as a matter of fact, real impressions are the first and the commonest source of such lively mnemonic images. But it is not always so. There are other sources of our mental imagery which compete, so to speak, with the region of real personal experience. And sometimes these leave behind them a vivid image having all the appearance of a genuine mnemonic image. When this is so, it is impossible by a mere introspective glance to detect the falsity of the message from the past. We are in the same position as the purchaser in a jet market, where a spurious commodity has got inextricably mixed up with the genuine, and there is no ready criterion by which he can distinguish the true from the false. Such a person, if he purchases freely, is pretty sure to make a number of mistakes. Similarly, all of us are liable to take counterfeit mnemonic images for genuine ones; that is to say, to fall into an illusion of "recollecting" what never really took place.

But what, it may be asked, are these false and illegitimate sources of mnemonic images, these unauthorized mints which issue a spurious mental coinage, and so confuse the genuine currency? They consist of two regions of our internal mental life, which most closely resemble the actual perception of real things in vividness and force, namely, dream-consciousness and waking imagination. Each of these may introduce into the mind vivid images which afterwards tend, under certain circumstances, to assume the guise of recollections of actual events.

That our dream-experience may now and again lead us into illusory recollection has already been hinted. And it is easy to understand why this is so. When dreaming we have, as we have seen, a mental experience which closely approximates in intensity and reality to that of waking perception. Consequently, dreams may leave behind them, for a time, vivid images which simulate the appearance of real images of memory. Most of us, perhaps, have felt this after-effect of dreaming on our waking thoughts. It is sometimes very hard to shake off the impression left by a vivid dream, as, for example, that a dead friend has returned to life. During the day that follows the dream, we have at intermittent moments something like an assurance that we have seen our lost friend; and though we immediately correct the impression by reflecting that we are recalling but a dream, it tends to revive within us with a strange pertinacity.

In addition to this proximate effect of a dream in disturbing the normal process of recollection, there is reason to suppose that dreams may exert a more remote effect on our memories. So widely different in its form is our dreaming from our waking experience, that our dreams are rarely recalled as wholes with perfect distinctness. They revive in us only as disjointed fragments, and only for brief moments when some accidental resemblance in the present happens to stir the latent trace they have left on our minds. We get sudden flashes out of our dream-world, and the process is too rapid, too incomplete for us to identify the region whence the flashes come.

It is highly probable that our dreams are, to a large extent, answerable for the sense of familiarity that we sometimes experience in visiting a new locality or in seeing a new face. If, as we have found some of the best authorities saying, we are, when asleep, always dreaming more or less distinctly, and if, as we know, dreaming is a continual process of transformation of our waking impressions in new combinations, it is not surprising that our dreams should sometimes take the form of forecasts of our waking life, and that consequently objects and scenes of this life never before seen should now and again wear a familiar look.

That some instances of this puzzling sense of familiarity can be explained in this way is proved. Thus, Paul Radestock, in the work Schlaf und Traum, already quoted, tells us: "When I have been taking a walk, with my thoughts quite unfettered, the idea has often occurred to me that I had seen, heard, or thought of this or that thing once before, without being able to recall when, where, and in what circumstances. This happened at the time when, with a view to the publication of the present work, I was in the habit of keeping an exact record of my dreams. Consequently, I was able to turn to this after these impressions, and on doing so I generally found the conjecture confirmed that I had previously dreamt something like it." Scientific inquiry is often said to destroy all beautiful thoughts about nature and life; but while it destroys it creates. Is it not almost a romantic idea that just as our waking life images itself in our dreams, so our dream-life may send back some of its shadowy phantoms into our prosaic every-day world, touching this with something of its own weird beauty?

Not only may dreams beget these momentary illusions of memory, they may give rise to something like permanent illusions. If a dream serves to connect a certain idea with a place or person, and subsequent experience does not tend to correct this, we may keep the belief that we have actually witnessed the event. And we may naturally expect that this result will occur most frequently in the case of those who habitually dream vividly, as young children.

It seems to me that many of the quaint fancies which children get into their heads about things they hear of arise in this way. I know a person who, when a child, got the notion that when his baby-brother was weaned, he was taken up on a grassy hill and tossed about. He had a vivid idea of having seen this curious ceremony. He has in vain tried to get an explanation of this picturesque rendering of an incident of babyhood from his friends, and has come to the conclusion that it was the result of a dream. If, as seems probable, children's dreams thus give rise to subsequent illusions of memory, the fact would throw a curious light on some of the startling quasi-records of childish experience to be met with in autobiographical literature.

Odd though it may at first appear, old age is said to resemble youth in this confusion of dream-recollection with the memory of waking experience. Dr. Carpenter[128] tells us of "a lady of advanced age who ... continually dreams about passing events, and seems entirely unable to distinguish between her dreaming and her waking experiences, narrating the former with implicit belief in them, and giving directions based on them." This confusion in the case of the old may possibly arise not from an increase in the intensity of the dreams, but from a decrease in the intensity of the waking impressions. As Sir Henry Holland remarks,[129] in old age life approaches to the state of a dream.

The other source of what may, by analogy with the hallucinations of sense, be called the peripherally originating spectra of memory is waking imagination. In certain morbid conditions of mind, and in the case of the few healthy minds endowed with special imaginative force, the products of this mental activity, may, as we saw when dealing with illusions of perception, closely resemble dreams in their vividness and apparent actuality. When this is the case, illusions of memory may arise at once just as in the case of dreams. This will happen more easily when the imagination has for some time been occupied with the same group of ideal scenes, persons, or events. To Dickens, as is well known, his fictitious characters were for the time realities, and after he had finished his story their forms and their doings lingered with him, assuming the aspect of personal recollections. So, too, the energetic activity of imagination which accompanies a deep and absorbing sympathy with another's painful experiences, may easily result in so vivid a realization of all their details as to leave an after-sense of personal suffering. All highly sympathetic persons who have closely accompanied beloved friends through a great sorrow have known something of this subsequent feeling.

The close connection and continuity between normal and abnormal states of mind is illustrated in the fact that in insanity the illusion of taking past imaginations for past realities becomes far more powerful and persistent. Abercrombie (Intellectual Powers, Part III. sec. iv. Sec. 2, "Insanity") speaks of "visions of the imagination which have formerly been indulged in of that kind which we call waking dreams or castle-building recurring to the mind in this condition, and now believed to have a real existence." Thus, for example, one patient believed in the reality of the good luck previously predicted by a fortune-teller. Other writers on mental disease observe that it is a common thing for the monomaniac to cherish the delusion that he has actually gained the object of some previous ambition, or is undergoing some previously dreaded calamity.

Nor is it necessary to these illusions of memory that there should be any exceptional force of imagination. A fairly vivid representation to ourselves of anything, whether real or fictitious, communicated by others, will often result in something very like a personal recollection. In the case of works of history and fiction, which adopt the narrative tense, this tendency to a subsequent illusion of memory is strengthened by the disposition of the mind at the moment of reading to project itself backwards as in an act of recollection. This is a point which will be further dealt with in the next chapter.

In most cases, however, illusions of memory growing out of previous activities of the imagination appear only after the lapse of some time, when in the natural course of things the mental images derived from actual experience would sink to a certain degree of faintness. Habitual novel-readers often catch themselves mistaking the echo of some passage in a good story for the trace left by an actual event. A person's name, a striking saying, and even an event itself, when we first come across it or experience it, may for a moment seem familiar to us, and to recall some past like impression, if it only happens to resemble something in the works of a favourite novelist. And so, too, any recital of another's experience, whether oral or literary, if it deeply interests us and awakens a specially vivid imagination of the events described, may easily become the starting-point of an illusory recollection.

Children are in the habit of "drinking in" with their vigorous and eager imaginations what is told them and read to them, and hence they are specially likely to fall into this kind of error. Not only so: when they grow up and their early recollections lose their definiteness, becoming a few fragments saved from a lost past, it must pretty certainly happen that if any ideas derived from these recitals are preserved, they will simulate the form of memories. Thus, I have often caught myself for a moment under the sway of the illusion that I actually visited the Exhibition of 1851, the reason being that I am able to recall the descriptions given to me of it by my friends, and the excitement attending their journey to London on the occasion. It is to be added that repetition of the act of imagination will tend still further to deepen the subsequent feeling that we are recollecting something. As Hartley well observes, a man, by repeating a story, easily comes to suppose that he remembers it.[130]

Here, then, we have another source of error that we must take into account in judging of the authenticity of an autobiographical narration of the events of childhood. The more imaginative the writer, the greater the risk of illusion from this source as well as from that of dream-fancies. It is highly probable, indeed, that in such full and explicit records of very early life as those given by Rousseau, by Goethe, or by De Quincey, some part of the quasi-narrative is based on mental images which come floating down the stream of time, not from the substantial world of the writer's personal experience, but from the airy region of dream-land or of waking fancy.

It is to be added that even when the quasi-recollection does answer to a real event of childish history, it may still be an illusion. The fact that others, in narrating events to us, are able to awaken imaginations that afterwards appear as past realities, suggests that much of our supposed early recollection owes its existence to what our parents and friends have from time to time told us respecting the first stages of our history.[131] We see, then, how much uncertainty attaches to all autobiographical description of very early life.

Modern science suggests another possible source of these distinct spectra of memory. May it not happen that, by the law of hereditary transmission, which is now being applied to mental as well as bodily phenomena, ancestral experiences will now and then reflect themselves in our mental life, and so give rise to apparently personal recollections? No one can say that this is not so. When the infant first steadies his eyes on a human face, it may, for aught we know, experience a feeling akin to that described above, when through a survival of dream-fancy we take some new scene to be already familiar. At the age when new emotions rapidly develop themselves, when our hearts are full of wild romantic aspirations, do there not seem to blend with the eager passion of the time deep resonances of a vast and mysterious past, and may not this feeling be a sort of reminiscence of prenatal, that is, ancestral experience?

This idea is certainly a fascinating one, worthy to be a new scientific support for the beautiful thought of Plato and of Wordsworth. But in our present state of knowledge, any reasoning on this supposition would probably appear too fanciful. Some day we may find out how much ancestral experience is capable of bequeathing in this way, whether simply shadowy, undefinable mental tendencies, or something like definite concrete ideas. If, for example, it were found that a child that was descended from a line of seafaring ancestors, and that had never itself seen or heard of the "dark-gleaming sea," manifested a feeling of recognition when first beholding it, we might be pretty sure that such a thing as recollection of prenatal events does take place. But till we have such facts, it seems better to refer the "shadowy recollections" to sources which fall within the individual's own experience.

We may now pass to those hallucinations of memory which are analogous to the centrally excited hallucinations of sense-perception. As I have observed, these are necessarily vague and imperfectly developed.

I have already had occasion to touch on the fact of the vast amount of our forgotten experience. And I observed that forgetfulness was a common negative condition of mnemonic illusion. I have now to complete this statement by the observation that total forgetfulness of any period or stage of our past experience necessarily tends to a vague kind of hallucination. In looking back on the past, we see no absolute gaps in the continuity of our conscious life; our image of this past is essentially one of an unbroken series of conscious experiences. But if through forgetfulness a part of the series is effaced from memory, how, it may be asked, is it possible to construct this perfectly continuous line? The answer is that we fill up such lacunae vaguely by help of some very imperfectly imagined common type of conscious experience. Just as the eye sees no gap in its field of vision corresponding to the "blind spot" of the retina, but carries its impression over this area, so memory sees no lacuna in the past, but carries its image of conscious life over each of the forgotten spaces.

Sometimes this process of filling in gaps in the past becomes more complete. Thus, for example, in recalling a particular night a week or so ago, I instinctively represent it to myself as so many hours of lying in bed with the waking sensations appropriate to the circumstances, as those of bodily warmth and rest, and of the surrounding silence and darkness.

It is apparent that I cannot conceive myself apart from some mode of conscious experience. In thinking of myself in any part of the past or future in which there is actually no consciousness, or of which the conscious content is quite unknown to me, I necessarily imagine myself as consciously experiencing something. If I picture myself under any definitely conceived circumstances, I irresistibly import into my mental image the feelings appropriate to these surroundings. In this way, people tend to imagine themselves after death as lying in the grave, feeling its darkness and its chilliness. If the circumstances of the time are not distinctly represented, the conception of the conscious experience which constitutes that piece of the ego is necessarily vague, and seems generally to resolve itself into a representation of ourselves as dimly self-conscious. What this consciousness of self consists of is a point that will be taken up presently.

Illusions with respect to Personal Identity.

It would seem to follow from these errors in imaginatively filling up our past life, that our consciousness of personal identity is by no means the simple and exact process which it is commonly supposed to be. I have already remarked that the very fact of there being so large a region of the irrevocable in our past experience proves our consciousness of personal continuity to be largely a matter of inference, or of imaginative conjecture, and not simply of immediate recollection. Indeed, it may be said that our power of ignoring whole regions of the past and of leaping complacently over huge gaps in our memory and linking on conscious experience with conscious experience, involves an illusory sense of continuity, and so far of personal identity. Thus, our ordinary image of our past life, if only by omitting the very large fraction passed in sleep, in at least an approximately unconscious state, clearly contains an ingredient of illusion.[132]

It is to be added that the numerous falsifications of our past history, which our retrospective imagination is capable of perpetrating, make our representation of ourselves at different moments and in different stages of our past history to a considerable extent illusory. Thus, though to mistake a past dream-experience for a waking one may not be to lose or confuse the sense of identity, since our dreams are, after all, a part of our experience, yet to imagine that we have ourselves seen what we have only heard from another or read is clearly to confuse the boundaries of our identity. And with respect to longer sections of our history, it is plain that when we wrongly assimilate our remote to our present self, and clothe our childish nature with the feelings and the ideas of our adult life, we identify ourselves overmuch. In this way, through the corruption of our memory, a kind of sham self gets mixed up with the real self, so that we cannot, strictly speaking, be sure that when we project a mnemonic image into the remote past we are not really running away from our true personality.

So far I have been touching only on slight errors in the recognition of that identical self which is represented as persisting through all the fluctuations of conscious life. Other and grosser illusions connected with personal identity are also found to be closely related to defects or disturbances of the ordinary mnemonic process, and so can be best treated here. In order to understand these, we must inquire a little into the nature of our idea and consciousness of a persistent self. Here, again, I would remind the reader that I am treating the point only so far as it can be treated scientifically or empirically, that is to say, by examining what concrete facts or data of experience are taken up into the idea of self. I do not wish to foreclose the philosophic question whether anything more than this empirical content is involved in the conception.

My idea of myself as persisting appears to be built up of certain similarities in the succession of my experiences. Thus, my permanent self consists, on the bodily side, of a continually renewable perception of my own organism, which perception is mainly visual and tactual, and which remains pretty constant within certain limits of time. With this objective similarity is closely conjoined a subjective similarity. Thus, the same sensibilities continue to characterize the various parts of my organism. Similarly, there are the higher intellectual, emotional, and moral peculiarities and dispositions. My idea of my persistent self is essentially a collective image representing a relatively unchanging material object, endowed with unchanging sensibilities and forming a kind of support for permanent higher mental attributes.

The construction of this idea of an enduring unchanging ego is rendered very much easier by the fact that certain concrete feelings are approximately constant elements in our mental life. Among these must be ranked first that dimly discriminated mass of organic sensation which in average states of health is fairly constant, and which stands in sharp contrast to the fluctuating external sensations. These feelings enter into and profoundly colour each person's mental image of himself. In addition to this, there are the frequently recurring higher feelings, the dominant passions and ideas which approximate more or less closely to constant factors of our conscious experience.

This total image of the ego becomes defined and rendered precise by a number of distinctions, as that between my own body or that particular material object with which are intimately united all my feelings, and other material objects in general; then between my organism and other human organisms, with which I learn to connect certain feelings answering to my own, but only faintly represented instead of actually realized feelings. To these prime distinctions are added others, hardly less fundamental, as those between my individual bodily appearance and that of other living bodies, between my personal and characteristic modes of feeling and thinking and those of others, and so on.

Our sense of personal identity may be said to be rooted in that special side of the mnemonic process which consists in the linking of all sequent events together by means of a thread of common consciousness. It is closely connected with that smooth, gliding movement of imagination which appears to involve some more or less distinct consciousness of the uniting thread of similarity. And so long as this movement is possible, so long, that is to say, as retrospective imagination detects the common element, which we may specifically call the recurring consciousness of self, so long is there the undisturbed assurance of personal identity. Nay, more, even when such a recognition might seem to be difficult, if not impossible, as in linking together the very unlike selves, viewed both on their objective and subjective sides, of childhood, youth, and mature life, the mind manages, as we have seen, to feign to itself a sufficient amount of such similarity.

But this process of linking stage to stage, of discerning the common or the recurring amid the changing and the evanescent, has its limits. Every great and sudden change in our experience tends, momentarily at least, to hinder the smooth reflux of imagination. It makes too sharp a break in our conscious life, so that imagination is incapable of spanning the gap and realizing the then and the now as parts of a connected continuous tissue.[133]

These changes may be either objective or subjective. Any sudden alteration of our bodily appearance sensibly impedes the movement of imagination. A patient after a fever, when he first looks in the glass, exclaims, "I don't know myself." More commonly the bodily changes which affect the consciousness of an enduring self are such as involve considerable alterations of coenaesthesis, or the mass of stable organic sensation. Thus, the loss of a limb, by cutting off a portion of the old sensations through which the organism may be said to be immediately felt, and by introducing new and unfamiliar feelings, will distinctly give a shock to our consciousness of self.

Purely subjective changes, too, or, to speak correctly, such as are known subjectively only, will suffice to disturb the sense of personal unity. Any great moral shock, involving something like a revolution in our recurring emotional experience, seems at the moment to rupture the bond of identity. And even some time after, as I have already remarked, such cataclysms in our mental geology lead to the imaginative thrusting of the old personality away from the new one under the form of a "dead self."[134]

We see, then, that the failure of our ordinary assurance of personal identity is due to the recognition of difference without similarity. It arises from an act of memory—for the mind must still be able to recall the past, dimly at least—but from a memory which misses its habitual support in a recognized element of constancy. If there is no memory, that is to say, if the past is a complete blank, the mind simply feels a rupture of identity without any transformation of self. This is our condition on awaking from a perfectly forgotten period of sleep, or from a perfectly unconscious state (if such is possible) when induced by anaesthetics. Such gaps are, as we have seen, easily filled up, and the sense of identity restored by a kind of retrospective "skipping." On the other hand, the confusion which arises from too great and violent a transformation of our remembered experiences is much less easily corrected. As long as the recollection of the old feelings remains, and with this the sense of violent contrast between the old and the new ones, so long will the illusion of two sundered selves tend to recur.

The full development of this process of imaginative fission or cleavage of self is to be met with in mental disease. The beginnings of such disease, accompanied as they commonly are with disturbances of bodily sensations and the recurring emotions, illustrate in a very interesting way the dependence of the recognition of self on a certain degree of uniformity in the contents of consciousness. The patient, when first aware of these changes, is perplexed, and often regards the new feelings as making up another self, a foreign Tu, as distinguished from the familiar Ego. And sometimes he expresses the relation between the old and the new self in fantastic ways, as when he imagines the former to be under the power of some foreign personality.

When the change is complete, the patient is apt to think of his former self as detached from his present, and of his previous life as a kind of unreal dream; and this fading away of the past into shadowy unreal forms has, as its result, a curious aberration in the sense of time. Thus, it is said that a patient, after being in an asylum only one day, will declare that he has been there a year, five years, and even ten years.[135] This confusion as to self naturally becomes the starting-point of illusions of perception; the transformation of self seeming to require as its logical correlative (for there is a crude logic even in mental disease) a transformation of the environment. When the disease is fully developed under the particular form of monomania, the recollection of the former normal self commonly disappears altogether, or fades away into a dim image of some perfectly separate personality. A new ego is now fully substituted for the old. In other and more violent forms of disease (dementia) the power of connecting the past and present may disappear altogether, and nothing but the disjecta membra of an ego remain.

* * * * *

Enough has, perhaps, been said to show how much of uncertainty and of self-deception enters into the processes of memory. This much-esteemed faculty, valuable and indispensable though it certainly is, can clearly lay no claim to that absolute infallibility which is sometimes said to belong to it. Our individual recollection, left to itself, is liable to a number of illusions even with regard to fairly recent events, and in the case of remote ones it may be said to err habitually and uniformly in a greater or less degree. To speak plainly, we can never be certain on the ground of our personal recollection alone that a distant event happened exactly in the way and at the time that we suppose. Nor does there seem to be any simple way by mere reflection on the contents of our memory of distinguishing what kinds of recollection are likely to be illusory.

How, then, it may be asked, can we ever be certain that we are faithfully recalling the actual events of the past? Given a fairly good, that is, a cultivated memory, it may be said that in the case of very recent events a man may feel certain that, when the conditions of careful attention at the time to what really happened were present, a distinct recollection is substantially correct. Also it is obvious that with respect to all repeated experiences our memories afford practically safe guides. When memory becomes the basis of some item of generalized knowledge, as, for example, of the truth that the pain of indigestion has followed a too copious indulgence in rich food, there is little room for an error of memory properly so called. On the other hand, when an event is not repeated in our experience, but forms a unique link in our personal history, the chances of error increase with the distance of the event; and here the best of us will do well to have resort to a process of verification or, if necessary, of correction.

In order thus to verify the utterances of memory, we must look beyond our own internal mental states to some external facts. Thus, the recollections of our early life may often be tested by letters written by ourselves or our friends at the time, by diaries, and so on. When there is no unerring objective record to be found, we may have recourse to the less satisfactory method of comparing our recollections with those of others. By so doing we may reach a rough average recollection which shall at least be free from any individual error corresponding to that of personal equation in perception. But even thus we cannot be sure of eliminating all error, since there may be a cause of illusion acting on all our minds alike, as, for example, the extraordinary nature of the occurrence, which would pretty certainly lead to a common exaggeration of its magnitude, etc., and since, moreover, this process of comparing recollections affords an opportunity for that reading back a present preconception into the past to which reference has already been made.

The result of our inquiry is less alarming than it looks at first sight. Knowledge is valuable for action, and error is chiefly hurtful in so far as it misdirects conduct. Now, in a general way, we do not need to act upon a recollection of single remote events; our conduct is sufficiently shaped by an accurate recollection of single recent events, together with those bundles of recollections of recurring events and sequences of events which constitute our knowledge of ourselves and our common knowledge of the world about us. Nature has done commendably well in endowing us with the means of cultivating our memories up to this point, and we ought not to blame her for not giving us powers which would only very rarely prove of any appreciable practical service to us.



NOTE.

MOMENTARY ILLUSIONS OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS.

The account of the apparent ruptures in our personal identity given in this chapter may help us to understand the strange tendency to confuse self with other objects which occasionally appears in waking consciousness and in dreams. These errors may be said generally to be due to the breaking up of the composite image of self into its fragments, and the regarding of certain of these only. Thus, the momentary occurrence of partial illusion in intense sympathy with others, including that imaginative projection of self into inanimate objects, to which reference has already been made, may be said to depend on exclusive attention to the subjective aspect of self, to the total disregard of the objective aspect. In other words, when we thus momentarily "lose ourselves," or merge our own existence in that of another object, we clearly let drop out of sight the visual representation of our own individual organism. On the other hand, when in dreams we double our personality, or represent to ourselves an external self which becomes the object of visual perception, it is probably because we isolate in imagination the objective aspect of our personality from the other and subjective aspect. It is not at all unlikely that the several confusions of self touched on in this chapter have had something to do with the genesis of the various historical theories of a transformed existence, as, for example, the celebrated doctrine of metempsychosis.