emed 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