Illusions: A Psychological Study

by James Sully

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 lacunæ 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.