t so. When the infant first
steadies his eyes on a human face, it may, for aught we know, experience
a feeling akin to that described above, when through a survival of
dream-fancy we take some new scene to be already familiar. At the age
when new emotions rapidly develop themselves, when our hearts are full
of wild romantic aspirations, do there not seem to blend with the eager
passion of the time deep resonances of a vast and mysterious past, and
may not this feeling be a sort of reminiscence of prenatal, that is,
ancestral experience?

This idea is certainly a fascinating one, worthy to be a new scientific
support for the beautiful thought of Plato and of Wordsworth. But in our
present state of knowledge, any reasoning on this supposition would
probably appear too fanciful. Some day we may find out how much
ancestral experience is capable of bequeathing in this way, whether
simply shadowy, undefinable mental tendencies, or something like
definite concrete ideas. If, for example, it were found that a child
that was descended from a line of seafaring ancestors, and that had
never itself seen or heard of the "dark-gleaming sea," manifested a
feeling of recognition when first beholding it, we might be pretty sure
that such a thing as recollection of prenatal events does take place.
But till we have such facts, it seems better to refer the "shadowy
recollections" to sources which fall within the individual's own
experience.

We may now pass to those hallucinations of memory which are analogous to
the _centrally_ excited hallucinations of sense-perception. As I have
observed, these are necessarily vague and imperfectly developed.

I have already had occasion to touch on the fact of the vast amount of
our forgotten experience. And I observed that forgetfulness was a common
negative condition of mnemonic illusion. I have now to complete this
statement by the observation that total forgetfulness of any period or
stage of our past experience necessarily tends to a vague kind of
hallucination. In looking back on the past, we see no absolute gaps in
the continuity of our conscious life; our image of this past is
essentially one of an unbroken series of conscious experiences. But if
through forgetfulness a part of the series is effaced from memory, how,
it may be asked, is it possible to construct this perfectly continuous
line? The answer is that we fill up such lacunae vaguely by help of some
very imperfectly imagined common