This will happen more easily when the imagination has been for some time 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 inagination 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.

In the case of most people, however, waking imagination seldom, if ever, rises to this pitch of reality. Hence the illusions of memory which arise from this source commonly 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. Persons' names, striking sayings, and events themselves, when first heard or witnessed, may seem familiar to us, and to recall some past like impression when they happen to resemble the creations of some favorite 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 startingpoint of an illusory recollection. Children are in the habit of "drinking in" with their vigorous 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,

dreams or castle-building recurring to the mind in this condition, and now believed to have a real existence.' Thus one patient believed in the reality of the good luck previously predicted by a fortune-teller.

they will simulate the form of memories. The present writer often catches himself falling for a moment into the illusion of believing that he actually visited the Exhibition of 1851, the reason being that he recalls the descriptions given to him of it by his friends, and the excitement attending their journey to London on the occasion.

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 dreamfancies. It is highly probable that in such full and explicit records as those given by Rousseau, by Goethe, or by De Quincey, some part of the narrative is based on mental images which come floating down the stream of time, not from any actual occurrence of the writer's personal experience, but from the airy region of dreamland or of waking fancy.

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 afterward 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. We see, then, how much uncertainty attaches to all autobiographical description of very early life.

Modern science suggests another possible source of these phosphenes 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 apparent personal recollections? No one can say that this is not so. When the infant first steadies his eyes on the objects of its environment, 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 pre-natal, that is, ancestral experience? The idea is a fascinating one, worthy to be a new scientific support for Plato's and Wordsworth's beautiful thought. But in our present stage 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 descended from a line of seafaring ancestors, which had never seen nor heard of the "dark-gleaming sea," manifested a feeling of recognition when first taken to behold it, we might be pretty sure that such a thing as pre-natal recollection 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.

It is commonly said by philosophers that our sense of personal identity rests on memory. But if the latter is as erring as we have seen, the former can hardly be as absolutely certain and incorruptible as some thinkers would make out. In point of fact, this sense of identity is diable to take strange forms, and to play us odd pranks. In dreams we often distinctly lose all hold on ourselves, and take up the curious position of spectators at a transformation scene, in which our own respectable Ego is playing a sort of game of "bo-peep" with us. And what happens in dreams may happen in waking life. Every act of intense sympathy is for the time a confusion of our sense of identity. Waking imagination, too, leads to a fictitious expansion of ourselves. Thus the novelist tells us that while he is writing his stories he is wont for the nonce to project himself into the figures, identifying himself with them. And our study of the phosphenes of memory has told us that all of us are liable to extend this idea of self beyond the limits of our actual personal experience. To mistake dream fancy for waking fact is not perhaps to lose the sense of identity, since our dreams are, after all, a part of our personal experience; but to imagine that we have actually seen what we have

simply heard from another's lips, is clearly to confuse the boundaries of our identity. Thus, through the corruption of our memories, a sort of sham self gets mixed up with our real self, so that we cannot, strictly speaking, be sure that when we project ourselves into a remote past we are not really running away from our true personality.

It is now time to pass to the second group of illusions of memory, which, according to the analogy of visual illusions, may be called atmospheric illusions. Here the degree of error is less than that in the case of phosphene illusions. There is something real, answering to the apparent recollection, and this reality falls within the individual's waking experience. But the reality is not truthfully represented by the present mnemonic image or group of images. 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 mental life.

For one thing our memories restore us only fragments of our past life. 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 an untrue coloring 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 afterward 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 event; 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 obliviscence 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 relic-images, which cannot be certainly known to answer to the most important and essential experiences of the times. 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 present writer's idea of the emotional experience of his school-days is built up out of a few scrap 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 a few 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 dis

appearance 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 conception of a past event. Suppose 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 afterward 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 products of past imagination not only give rise, as we have seen, to baseless illusions of memory, but serve to corrupt and partially falsify recollections that have a genuine basis of fact. This class of mnemonic illusions approaches 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 afterward, 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 of mesmerism and spiritualism, are probably much oftener illusions of memory than of perception.*

In many cases, however, 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 get imported 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

* See Dr. Carpenter's "Mental Physiology," fourth edition, p. 456.

standing between the spectator and a house is not sharply distinguished from the latter it may serve to give it a very odd appearance.

These confusions of the mental image may even arise after a short interval has elapsed. In the case of many of the fleeting impressions that only get half recollected, this kind of error is very easy. Thus, for example, I 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 our minds by a link of resemblance, or that we had dealings with the other person about the same time. Similarly, when an event gets put into a wrong locality, we may find that it is because we heard of the occurrence when staying at the particular place, 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 we 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 air and damp on some old manuscript. Besides this passive process of transformation, there is a more active one in which our present minds co-operate. This may be illustrated by the operation of trying to interpret" 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 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. Now the suggestion that naturally arises in our minds 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.

This kind of illusion of memory depending on present imagination is strikingly illustrated by the curious cases of mistaken identity 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 countenances. What helps in this case to produce the illusion is the preconception that the present man is the witness' 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 old friend's face out of elements supplied by the new face.

We 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.

From this cause arises the 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 mostly 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 color to our recollection. 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 in revisiting some garden 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. People who a little outshone our own circle of friends, perhaps, in style of dress and living, seemed to us as children little short of princes and princesses. Could we actually see them with our present eyes, we should, alas, no longer find the glory in which our young fancies had encircled their heads.

While the past may thus take an illusory hue from the very changes which our emotional life undergoes, it becomes still further transformed by the idealizing touch of a present feeling. This is so familiar a fact as hardly to need illustration. Our emotions of love, of reverence, of æsthetic admiration are artists that employ the past as a kind of canvas for the exercise of their imaginative skill.

We instinctively tend to idealize the objects of a past love. The old rule de mortuis nihil nisi bonum has its foundations deep laid in our emotional nature. It is much the same with the emotions of beauty and sublimity that attach to objects of inanimate nature as well as to human beings. Even a painful emotion, as resentment and hatred, may to some extent effect this result of transformation. By dwelling habitually on the wrongs done us by an old friend, and forgetting all the good things we know of him, we may come to transform this person into a monster very unlike the reality.

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 records of our actual life were ever read out to us we should be able to recognize it. It looks as though we could be only sure of recalling 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 new and grotesquely unlike shapes. 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.

And now we may pass to the third class of illusions of memory, those which may be called errors of perspective. This is the least degree of mnemonic illusion. The recollection may reproduce a real occurrence, and reproduce it in its essential features, but may assign it a wrong place in the sequent order of the past, just as the eye may see an object as it is, but err as to its distance.

In order to understand these errors of mnemonic perspective, we must see what customarily determines our judgment of the remoteness of past events. A certain analogy will be found to hold here between the mnemonic and the visual judgment of distance. Among the many cir