In the same manner, a tendency to read a particular meaning into a word may lead to the misapprehension of the word. To give an illustration: I was lately reading the fifth volume of G. H. Lewes's Problems of Life and Mind. In reading the first sentence of one of the sections, I again and again fell into the error of taking "The great Lagrange," for "The great Language." On glancing back I saw that the section was headed "On Language," and I at once recognized the cause of my error in the pre-existence in my mind of the representative image of the word "language."
In concluding this short account of the errors of insight, I may observe that their range is obviously much greater than that of the previously considered classes of presentative illusion. This is, indeed, involved in what has been said about the nature of the process. Insight, as we have seen, though here classed with preservative cognition, occupies a kind of border-land between immediate knowledge or intuition and inference, shading off from the one to the other. And in the very nature of the case the scope for error must be great. Even overlooking human reticence, and, what is worse, human hypocrisy, the conditions of an accurate reading of others' minds are rarely realized. If, as has been remarked by a good authority, one rarely meets, even among intelligent people, with a fairly accurate observer of external things, what shall be said as to the commonly claimed power of "intuitive insight" into other people's thoughts and feelings, as though it were a process above suspicion? It is plain, indeed, on a little reflection, that, taking into account what is required in the way of large and varied experience (personal and social), a habit of careful introspection, as well as a habit of subtle discriminative attention to the external signs of mental life, and lastly, a freedom from prepossession and bias, only a very few can ever hope even to approximate to good readers of character.
And then we have to bear in mind that this large amount of error is apt to remain uncorrected. There is not, as in the case of external perception, an easy way of verification, by calling in another sense; a misapprehension, once formed, is apt to remain, and I need hardly say that errors in these matters of mutual comprehension have their palpable practical consequences. All social cohesion and co-operation rest on this comprehension, and are limited by its degree of perfection. Nay, more, all common knowledge itself, in so far as it depends on a mutual communication of impressions, ideas, and beliefs, is limited by the fact of this great liability to error in what at first seems to be one of the most certain kinds of knowledge.
In view of this depressing amount of error, our solace must be found in the reflection that this seemingly perfect instrument of intuitive insight is, in reality, like that of introspection, in process of being fashioned. Mutual comprehension has only become necessary since man entered the social state, and this, to judge by the evolutionist's measure of time, is not so long ago. A mental structure so complex and delicate requires for its development a proportionate degree of exercise, and it is not reasonable to look yet for perfect precision of action. Nevertheless, we may hope that, with the advance of social development, the faculty is continually gaining in precision and certainty. And, indeed, this hope is already assured to us in the fact that the faculty has begun to criticise itself, to distinguish between an erroneous and a true form of its-operation. In fact, all that has been here said about illusions of insight has involved the assumption that intellectual culture sharpens the power and makes it less liable to err.
CHAPTER X.
ILLUSIONS OF MEMORY.
Thus far we have been dealing with Presentative Illusions, that is to say, with the errors incident to the process of what may roughly be called presentative cognition. We have now to pass to the consideration of Representative Illusion, or that kind of error which attends representative cognition in so far as it is immediate or self-sufficient, and not consciously based on other cognition. Of such immediate representative cognition, memory forms the most conspicuous and most easily recognized variety. Accordingly, I proceed to take up the subject of the Illusions of Memory.[111]
The mystery of memory lies in the apparent immediateness of the mind's contact with the vanished past. In "looking back" on our life, we seem to ourselves for the moment to rise above the limitations of time, to undo its work of extinction, seizing again the realities which its on-rushing stream had borne far from us. Memory is a kind of resurrection of the buried past: as we fix our retrospective glance on it, it appears to start anew into life; forms arise within our minds which, we feel sure, must faithfully represent the things that were. We do not ask for any proof of the fidelity of this dramatic representation of our past history by memory. It is seen to be a faithful imitation, just because it is felt to be a revival of the past. To seek to make the immediate testimony of memory more sure seems absurd, since all our ways of describing and illustrating this mental operation assume that in the very act of performing it we do recover a part of our seemingly "dead selves."
To challenge the veracity of a person's memory is one of the boldest things one can do in the way of attacking deep-seated conviction. Memory is the peculiar domain of the individual. In going back in recollection to the scenes of other years he is drawing on the secret store-house of his own consciousness, with which a stranger must not intermeddle. To cast doubt on a person's memory is commonly resented as an impertinence, hardly less rude than to question his reading of his own present mental state. Even if the challenger professedly bases his challenge on the testimony of his own memory, the challenged party is hardly likely to allow the right of comparing testimonies. He can in most cases boldly assert that those who differ from him are lacking in his power of recollection. The past, in becoming the past, has, for most people, ceased to be a common object of reference; it has become a part of the individual's own inner self, and cannot be easily dislodged or shaken.