iting events, such as
unexpected holidays, success in the winning of prizes, famous "rows"
with the masters, and so on.

Besides the impossibility of getting at the average and prevailing
mental tone of a distant section of life, there is a special difficulty
in determining the degree of happiness of the past, arising from the
fact that our memory for pleasures and for pains may not be equally
good. Most people, perhaps, can recall the enjoyments of the past much
more vividly than the sufferings. On the other hand, there seem to be
some who find the retention of the latter the easier of the two. This
fact should not be forgotten in reading the narrative of early hardships
which some recent autobiographies have given us.

Not only does our idea of the past become inexact by the mere decay and
disappearance of essential features, it becomes positively incorrect
through the gradual incorporation of elements that do not properly
belong to it. Sometimes it is easy to see how these extraneous ideas get
imported into our mental representation of a past event. Suppose, for
example, that a man has lost a valuable scarf-pin. His wife suggests
that a particular servant, whose reputation does not stand too high, has
stolen it. When he afterwards recalls the loss, the chances are that he
will confuse the fact with the conjecture attached to it, and say he
remembers that this particular servant did steal the pin. Thus, the past
activity of imagination serves to corrupt and partially falsify
recollections that have a genuine basis of fact.

It is evident that this class of mnemonic illusions approximates in
character to illusions of perception. When the imagination supplies the
interpretation at the very time, and the mind reads this into the
perceived object, the error is one of perception. When the addition is
made afterwards, on reflecting upon the perception, the error is one of
memory. The "fallacies of testimony" which depend on an adulteration of
pure observation with inference and conjecture, as, for example, the
inaccurate and wild statements of people respecting their experiences at
spiritualist _seances_, while they illustrate the curious blending of
both kinds of error, are probably much oftener illusions of memory than
of perception.[125]

Although in many cases we can account to ourselves for this confusion of
fact and imagination, in other cases it is difficult to see any close
relation between the fact remembered a