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may sometimes be had from an observer at a distance in time and place, because of his freedom from local passions.

Illness and mental shock have much influence upon the reliability of memory, which often escapes notice through the gradual and unpronounced character of the transition between health and disease. Memory is readily influenced by suggestion, so that spontaneous recollections are likely to be more accurate than those elicited through questioning or awakened by the opinions of other persons, the reading of newspapers, etc. Environment, as a suggestive influence, may have an important relation to accurate recollection. An eminent authority has said that anyone who does not believe in the importance of examining a witness at the place of the event in question needs only to conduct such an examination twice, once at court and again at the place, when he will certainly doubt no more.

The accuracy of memory is much improved by reflection, that is, by giving careful attention to what we would remember, and thus all the causes which interfere with attention interfere also with the original impression of the memory function and with its accuracy in the form of recall. The tendency toward reflection being determined by our general state of feeling, the latter may have much influence upon memory. At a certain time, a man may have an excellent memory for things of a given kind, because deeply interested in them, and later almost entirely forget them, his interest having waned: so with the schoolboy's memory for his lessons and the lawyer's special knowledge of science as bearing upon the interest of a client.

Memory, like the senses, is very subject to illusion. The idea that a thing has been experienced which has

not been often creeps into the reproductions of memory, and may be so inwoven with the true threads of the fabric that detection is most difficult or impossible. Children often think that they have experienced things of which they have been told and so, too, when they have intensely desired anything; and this is true of many imaginative adults. We often believe, no doubt, that we have had a feeling, as children, which has really been experienced much later and has been imagined back into our childhood. The autobiographer's reminiscences of his early life must be taken with many grains of salt.

Always, there is a tendency to substitute for the proper feeling of a time past the feeling which such an event as the one remembered would awaken in us now. When the recollection of events seems incomplete, we tend to fill in the gaps with plausible material supplied by our present unconscious ingenuity. When a recollection seems too improbable, it may be censored into more reasonable but perhaps less accurate form by our common sense. The ego, always seeking its pleasure, inclines strongly to modify the picture of an event in which it has had a part in such manner that it may appear in a more pleasing guise more powerful, more sagacious, more noble, or that an individual disliked may appear in the wrong, more feeble, more contemptiblė. However correct may have been the observation of our facts, they are apt to be transformed in memory toward a form corresponding with our own inclinations. In our recollections, an important part of the associations may be forgotten, which will cause the part remembered to stand out from an untrue environment. Dream experience may persist and be incorporated in our memories as actual experiences of the waking consciousness.

As is generally known, by frequent repetition a man may come to regard his entirely fictitious story as pure truth.

Memory, like the senses again, is subject to hallucination. The event remembered as external fact may have had only an internal or subjective basis; or it may correspond to no previous experience whatever, being merely a present conscious state thrown backward into the past. In the very old, the distinction between the dreaming and the waking experience may gradually become effaced, so that recollections of fact and those of imagination appear to have the same validity.

The minds of pronounced mystic type may manifest, at all ages, this same strange inability to discriminate between the recollections which are based upon external fact and those which are hallucinatory. This phenomenon as occurring in the mystic is to be explained, no doubt, through the subtle action of unconscious currents which tend toward gratification of the innate wishes. A similar sophistication of memory, still more marked, is found among the insane. Strange as it may appear to the ordinary man, such lack of discrimination between fact and phantasy may seem no infirmity to the mystic, who inclines to regard the waking dream or twilight state of unconsciousness as man's nearest approach to reality or absolute truth.

We suppose, usually, that a man willfully lies when he gives a false account of what we know to have been within his experience, but the honest man and the dishonest, alike, may tell an untruth solely through fault of memory. Through memory we seem to live again. in the past, and though its representations be less vivid than the impressions of the present moment, they are yet accompanied by a sense of veracity such as characterizes the latter and appear hardly less worthy of

confidence, and accordingly the conviction based upon memory is hard to shatter. Yet our daily experience of ourselves and other men shows this subjective sense of certainty to have but little value.

The basis of every thought and every act of our life is memory. The processes of perception, of reasoning, and of "willing," are intricate masses of memories, of respectively increasing complexity. Each memoryelement falls at least a little short of the original mental state which it is supposed to represent: the whole aggregate then, in spite of its accompanying sense of assurance, is a tissue saturated with falsity.

The psyche is a loose-jointed, inaccurate machine, very inadequately adapted to its environment, and its continual output is error; but through our ignorance and self-conceit, we are usually unaware of this fact, and even the recognition of it is seldom disquieting. We now pass to a study of that element in our nature which is the true determinant of our thought and action.

CHAPTER IV

THE FEELING FUNCTION

Its Control of Intellect. We have seen that the two great components of mind are the states of knowing and the states of feeling. We have given some consideration to the nature of knowing and to the ways in which it conduces to error. We shall now similarly consider feeling. The intellect has its frailties, but it is seldom free to do its best, being in absolute bondage to feeling. The events of the so-called external world are facts, and the principles which may be legitimately abstracted from these are fairly fixed and definite conceptions; and as to these facts and conceptions there should be a general agreement among men.

There is a best way, probably, of doing everything and there is a best or truest way, no doubt, of regarding every possible object of human thought. Why, then, should there be such a vast diversity of opinion among us? In great degree, certainly, because our cognitive processes are driven astray by feeling. The relation between intellect and feeling is such that we may say, with Bacon: "Whatsoever affairs pass such a man's hands, he crooketh them to his own ends."

All conscious psychic life consists of a continuous alternation of passive or receptive and reactive consciousness. In its earliest form the psychic life is essentially an alternation of sensation and movement.

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