Illusions by James Sully (story reading txt) 📕

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