le. Broadly speaking, memory is
trustworthy in proportion to the vividness of the experience and to its
nearness in time. If the house next door was struck by lightning half a
minute ago, my memory of what I saw and heard will be so reliable that
it would be preposterous to doubt whether there had been a flash at
all. And the same applies to less vivid experiences, so long as they are
recent. I am absolutely certain that half a minute ago I was sitting in
the same chair in which I am sitting now. Going backward over the day,
I find things of which I am quite certain, other things of which I am
almost certain, other things of which I can become certain by thought
and by calling up attendant circumstances, and some things of which I
am by no means certain. I am quite certain that I ate my breakfast this
morning, but if I were as indifferent to my breakfast as a philosopher
should be, I should be doubtful. As to the conversation at breakfast,
I can recall some of it easily, some with an effort, some only with a
large element of doubt, and some not at all. Thus there is a continual
gradation in the degree of self-evidence of what I remember, and a
corresponding gradation in the trustworthiness of my memory.

Thus the first answer to the difficulty of fallacious memory is to say
that memory has degrees of self-evidence, and that these correspond
to the degrees of its trustworthiness, reaching a limit of perfect
self-evidence and perfect trustworthiness in our memory of events which
are recent and vivid.

It would seem, however, that there are cases of very firm belief in a
memory which is wholly false. It is probable that, in these cases, what
is really remembered, in the sense of being immediately before the mind,
is something other than what is falsely believed in, though something
generally associated with it. George IV is said to have at last believed
that he was at the battle of Waterloo, because he had so often said that
he was. In this case, what was immediately remembered was his repeated
assertion; the belief in what he was asserting (if it existed) would
be produced by association with the remembered assertion, and would
therefore not be a genuine case of memory. It would seem that cases of
fallacious memory can probably all be dealt with in this way, i.e. they
can be shown to be not cases of memory in the strict sense at all.

One important point about self-evidence is made clear by the case of
memory, and that