THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF SELF. 373 



assemblage of facts. We often say of a man ' lie is so 

 changed one would not know liim '; and so does a man, 

 less often, speak of himself. These changes in the me, 

 recognized by the I, or bj outside observers, may be grave 

 or slight. They deserve some notice here. 



THE MUTATIONS OP THE SELF 



may be divided into two main classes : 



1. Alterations of memory ; and 



2. Alterations in the present bodily and spiritual selves. 



1. Alterations of memory are either losses or false recol- 

 lections. In either case the me is changed. Should a man 

 be punished for what he did in his childhood and no longer 

 remembers ? Should he be j)unished for crimes enacted 

 in post-epileptic unconsciousness, somnambulism, or in any 

 involuntarily induced state of which no recollection is re- 

 tained ? Law, in accord with common-sense, says : " No ; 

 he is not the same person forensically now which he was 

 then." These losses of memory are a normal incident of 

 extreme old age, and the person's me shrinks in the ratio 

 of the facts that have disappeared. 



In dreams we forget our waking experiences ; they are 

 as if they were not. And the converse is also true. As a 

 rule, no memory is retained during the waking state of 

 what has haj)pened during mesmeric trance, although when 

 again entranced the person may remember it distinctly, and 

 may then forget facts belonging to the waking state. We 

 thus have, within the bounds of healthy mental life, an 

 approach to an alternation of one's. 



False m.^mories are by no means rare occurrences in 

 most of us, and, whenever they occur, they distort the con- 

 sciousness of the me. Most people, probabl}', are in doubt 

 about certain matters ascribed to their past. They may 

 have seen them, may have said them, done them, or they 

 may only have dreamed or imagined they did so. The 

 content of a dream will oftentimes insert itself into the 

 stream of real life in a most perplexing way. The most 

 frequent source of false memory is the accounts we give to 

 others of our experiences. Such accounts we almost al- 



