t have since taken place, he is an informal historian. He
would become one in a formal and technical sense if he supplemented and
controlled his memory by ransacking papers, and taking elaborate pains
to gather evidence on the events he wished to relate. This systematic
investigation, especially when it goes back to first sources, widens the
basis for imaginative reconstruction. It buttresses somewhat the frail
body of casual facts that in the first instance may have engaged an
individual's attention.

History is nothing but assisted and recorded memory. It might almost be
said to be no science at all, if memory and faith in memory were not
what science necessarily rests on. In order to sift evidence we must
rely on some witness, and we must trust experience before we proceed to
expand it. The line between what is known scientifically and what has
to be assumed in order to support that knowledge is impossible to draw.
Memory itself is an internal rumour; and when to this hearsay within the
mind we add the falsified echoes that reach us from others, we have but
a shifting and unseizable basis to build upon. The picture we frame of
the past changes continually and grows every day less similar to the
original experience which it purports to describe.

[Sidenote: Second sight requires control.]

It is true that memory sometimes, as in a vision, seems to raise the
curtain upon the past and restore it to us in its pristine reality. We
may imagine at such moments experience can never really perish, but,
though hidden by chance from the roving eye, endures eternally in some
spiritual sphere. Such bodily recovery of the past, however, like other
telepathic visions, can never prove its own truth. A lapse into by-gone
perception, a sense of living the past over with all its vivid minutiae
and trivial concomitants, might involve no true repetition of anything
that had previously existed. It might be a fresh experience altogether.
The sense of knowing constitutes only a working presumption for
experiment to start with; until corroboration comes that presumption can
claim no respect from the outsider.

[Sidenote: Nature the theme common to various memories.]

While memory remains a private presumption, therefore, it can be
compared with nothing else that might test its veracity. Only when
memory is expressed and, in the common field of expression, finds itself
corroborated by another memory, does it rise somewhat in dignity and