[ 44 ] 



some other nervous disorder, may be the best which 

 can be offered by witnesses in their condition, and 

 may be of real assistance in diagnosis. " Swearing 

 that black is white " is a proverbial example of 

 unscrupulous lying, but a witness giving evidence in 

 perfect good faith might swear that red was green, if 

 he were colour-blind. Seeing, however, that all 

 statements involve syntaxis, and that comparatively 

 few contain explicit reference to anything else, it is 

 of much more general importance to consider the 

 truth of evidence in relation to this. The ideal 

 evidence would be a record of the witness's whole 

 series of mental operations, so far as they had any 

 relation to the matter in hand. This is unattainable ; 

 but evidence is not of the best kind unless it contain 

 sufficient indications of the main syntaxes, or pro- 

 cesses of thought, through which the witness passed 

 in coming to the conclusions which he states. I 

 hold farther, that evidence is not given with perfect 

 openness if the witness intentionally suppress these 

 indications in regard to syntaxes which he remembers 

 to have considered important, whether they be com- 

 patible with his main conclusions or not. But wit- 

 nssses, however willing, are seldom able to give much 

 information of this kind ; to the witness himself the 

 syntaxes are of less impoitance than the conclusions, 

 and he will remember the latter vividly when he has 

 only vague and confused reminiscences of the former. 

 It is one of the obstacles to a scientific study of 



