374 PSYCHOLOGY. 



ways make both more simple and more interesting than the 

 truth. We qnote "svhat we shoukl have said or done, 

 rather than what we really said or did ; and in the first 

 telling we may be fully aware of the distinction. But ere 

 long the fiction expels the reality from memory and reigns 

 in its stead alone. This is one great source of the fallibiU 

 ity of testimony meant to be quite honest. Esjjecially 

 where the marvellous is concerned, the story takes a tilt 

 that way, and the memory foUow^s the story. Dr. Carpen- 

 ter quotes from Miss Cobbe the following, as an instance 

 of a very common sort : 



' ' It happened once to the Writer to hear a most scrupulously con- 

 scientious friend narrate an incident of table-turning, to which she 

 appended an assurance that the table rapped when nobody tvas within 

 a yard of it. The writer being confounded by this latter fact, the 

 lady, though fully satisfied of the accuracy of her statement, promised 

 to look at the note she had made ten years previously of the transac- 

 tion. The note was examined, and was found to contain the distinct 

 statement that the table rapped when the hands of six persons rested 

 on it ! The lady's memory as to all other points j^roved to be strictly 

 correct ; and in this point she had erred in entire good faith."* 



It is next to impossible to get a story of this sort accu- 

 rate in all its details, although it is the inessential details 

 that sufter most change. t Dickens and Balzac were said to 

 have constantly mingled their fictions with their real expe- 

 riences. Every one must have known some specimen of 

 our mortal dust so intoxicated with the thought of his own 

 person and the sound of his own voice as neA^er to be able 

 even to think the truth when his autobiography was in 

 question. Amiable, harmless, radiant J. V. ! mayst thou 

 ne'er wake to the difierence between thy real and thy 

 fondly-imagined self ! % 



* Hours of Work and Play, p. 100. 



+For a careful study of the errors in narratives, see E. Gurney: Phan- 

 tasms of the Living, vol. i. pp. 12&-158. In the Proceedings of the 

 Society for Psychical Research for May 1887 Mr. Richard Hodgson shows 

 by an extraordinary array of instances how utterly inaccurate everyone's 

 description from memory of a rapid .series of events is certain to be. 



I See Josiah Royce (Mind, vol. 13. p. 244, and Proceedings of Am. Soc. 

 of Psych. Research, vol. i. p. 366), for evidence that a certain sort of hal- 

 lucination of memory which he calls ' pseudo-presentiment ' is no uncom- 

 mon phenomenon. 



