re 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