is fitted on
that account to excite a feeling akin to reverence. So, again, any
rupture in our mental development may lead us to exaggerate the distance
of some past portion of our experience. When we have broken with our
former selves, either in the way of worsening or bettering, we tend to
project these further into the past.

It is only when the sting of the recollection is removed, when, for
example, the calling up of the image of a lost friend is no longer
accompanied with the bitterness of futile longing, that a healthy mind
ventures to nourish recollections of such remote events and to view
these as part of its recent experiences. In this case the mnemonic image
becomes transformed into a kind of present emotional possession, an
element of that idealized and sublimated portion of our experience with
which all imaginative persons fill up the emptiness of their actual
lives, and to which the poet is wont to give an objective embodiment in
his verse.

_Distortions of Memory._

It is now time to pass to the second group of illusions of memory,
which, according to the analogy of visual errors, may be called
atmospheric illusions. Here the degree of error is greater than in the
case of illusions of time-perspective, since the very nature of the
events or circumstances is misconceived. We do not recall the event as
it happened, but see it in part only, and obscured, or bent and
distorted as by a process of refraction. Indeed, this transformation of
the past does closely correspond with the transformation of a visible
object effected by intervening media. Our minds are such refracting
media, and the past reappears to us not as it actually was when it was
close to us, but in numerous ways altered and disguised by the
intervening spaces of our conscious experience.

To begin with, what we call recollection is uniformly a process of
softening the reality. When we appear to ourselves to realize events of
the remote past, it is plain that our representation in a general way
falls below the reality: the vividness, the intensity of our impressions
disappears. More particularly, so far as our experiences are emotional,
they tend thus to become toned down by the mere lapse of time and the
imperfections of our reproductive power. That which we seem to see in
the act of recollection is thus very different from the reality.

Not only is there this general deficiency in mnemonic representation,
there are special deficiencies