All that the most attentive observation teaches us is that sometimes the suggested image is projected and localized in the panorama of the past, of which it appears to be a fragment, and sometimes it is referred to a present object, and throws off the character of oldness, so as to appear actual.”1 When, therefore, we say a witness is guessing and does not really recollect, can we truly distinguish? Are not both processes alike, in following out association of ideas?... It would seem then that it is impossible to distinguish recollection from inference in the way desired; and any one who will swear that the impression left on him by a conversation was a recollection and not an inference, will in our opinion swear to a great deal.

But this is not our only objection to the passage in question; there appears to lie at the root of it a fallacious idea that impressions are not to be accepted as evidence because less trustworthy than statements of recollection of facts. Yet we never do under any circumstance reproduce all that has happened, and we intentionally forget much that we see and hear, for it is only by omitting some details that we can recall what we want. What memory gives us is always an impression, or, as Professor Stout calls it, a generic image: "We simply make an outline sketch, in which the salient characters of things and events and actions appear, without their individualizing details. . . . It is possible for me to recall the whole event of taking breakfast, which occupied half an hour, in the fraction of a minute, and then pass on to something else." It is thus idle in the sphere of memory to seek for anything better than impressions, and if we are to discredit these, we must discredit all.

When an

There are various ways in which the memory can be assisted. actual impression cannot be repeated, its reproduction will to some extent have the same result; thus we can keep the images of remote experiences from disappearing by periodically reviving them, as when children talk with their parents about common experiences of the past. .. Now, looked at as a revival of memory, it may be a valuable thing for witnesses to talk over their experiences with one another before giving evidence; but this aspect of it is entirely left out of account in the view which is usually taken of it. Its sole object is always taken to be to concoct together a story which each will tell consistently; if a witness admits in the box that he has talked over the matter with another witness before entering the court, he is as often as not considered unreliable merely on that account. We do not wish to maintain that no evidence is concocted, or that it is never concocted in this manner; but we do protest against such a view being invariably taken. We suggest as an alternative that talking over the occurrences beforehand may sometimes by reviving the memory render the evidence given, not less, but more reliable.

It has no doubt been frequently noticed that it is easier to recall events in the order in which they occurred, and that witnesses, if left to themselves, habitually narrate occurrences in chronological order; it has always struck the writer that the method usually adopted by public prosecutors of asking questions, though it may be useful in excluding irrelevant matter, is certainly calculated to hinder memory. What may appear to be irrelevant, according to the Evidence Act, may in fact be a necessary link in the association of

1 Binet, Psychology of Reasoning, p. 176.

2 Stout, Analytical Psychology, Vol. II, pp. 184-185.

ideas of the witness, and if closely examined will often be admissible under § 6 or one of the following sections of the Act. Dr. J. Ward has explained the order of recall as follows: "In a series of associated presentations, A, B, C, D, E, such as the movements made in writing, the words of a poem learned by heart, or the simple letters of the alphabet themselves, we find that each member recalls its successor but not its predecessor. . . . B recalls C; why does not C recall B? We have seen that any reproduction at all of A or B or C depends primarily upon its having been the object of special attention so as to occupy at least momentarily the focus of consciousNow we can in the first instance only surmise that the order in which they are reproduced is determined by the order in which they were thus attended to when first presented."..

ness.

It is highly important to allow a witness time when giving his evidence, not merely because hurry causes him to say what he may not really intend, but because of the actual process by which we recall a forgotten thing. Professor James describes it thus: "We recollect the general subject to which the thought relates; the thing is a gap in the midst of other things. We then think over the details and from each detail there radiates lines of association forming so many tentative guesses. Many at once are seen to be irrelevant. These added associations arise independently of the will by a spontaneous process, and our will lingers over those which seem pertinent and ignores the rest. Then the accumulation of associates becomes so great that the combined tensions of their neural processes break through the bar, and the nervous wave pours into the tract which has so long been awaiting its advent."

Memoranda for the purpose of refreshing memory are of course admissible both in the English and the Indian law under certain circumstances. The legal writers above quoted have this to say: "It is further to be observed that the committing of a statement to writing calls forth unavoidably a greater degree of attention than the exhibition of it viva voce in the way of ordinary conversation. If this be done honestly, at the time of the occurrence which forms the subject of the statement, or so soon afterwards that the incidents must have been fresh in the writer's memory, the writing is a most reliable means of preserving the truth, more reliable indeed than simple memory itself." This is somewhat loosely expressed. If it is intended to say that the writing calls forth a greater degree of attention to the occurrence itself, the statement is in the nature of a "hysteron proteron." For the writing does not in any way cause the attention, which must be prior to it, but it is the attention given which aids retention and so facilitates the subsequent commitment to writing, the writing being merely the mode of expressing the conscious thought. If, however, all that is meant is that the committing to writing calls forth greater attention to the writing than the speaking of the occurrence does to the speaking, this may or may not be so, we should say, according to the circumstances, but we do not quite understand either the value or the application of such a statement here. If we may conjecture, perhaps the passage was intended to assert that writing causes reflection on the occurrence, and this reflection, while the occurrence is recent, impresses it on the memory better than the mere act of speaking it. This is doubtless true; when we, so to speak, objectify anything, it involves care and attention to the process, i.e. here

the cerebral activity; but after all the passage amounts to little more than saying that memory aided by something else is more reliable than memory aided by nothing else, a somewhat self-evident proposition.

These same writers go on to distinguish three ways of using such a memorandum. (1) The writing is in the stricter sense used to refresh the memory; that is, the witness has a present memory of the facts after the inspection of the writing. In this case the document is resorted to to revive a faded memory and the witness swears from the actual recollection of the facts which the document evokes. Memory is in other words restored. The italics are those of the commentators; to speak of "reviving a faded memory," and "restoring memory" is open to the objection that memory is always a construction from the present, and it is therefore better to speak of a past recollection. What is really revived or restored is the mental image, and it is because of the power of words to do this that documents are used for this purpose.

(2) The next case, viz. where the witness merely recollects having seen the writing before, and remembers that at the time he saw it, he knew the contents to be correct, seems to clearly involve inference.

(3) The third case is "where it brings to the mind of the witness neither any recollection of the facts mentioned in it, nor any recollection of the writing itself, but which nevertheless enables him to swear to a particular fact from the conviction of his mind on seeing a writing which he knows to be genuine." It is explained by those authors that the witness here swears "from a conviction arising from the knowledge of his own habits and conduct sufficiently strong to make the existence of the document wholly irreconcilable with the non-existence of the fact, and so to convince him of the affirmative"; and again "the witness is allowed to testify to the matter so recorded because he knows he could not have made the entry unless the fact had been true." It is evident from these explanations that the witness is here allowed to give evidence from inference; he infers from his implicit knowledge of his self that something which he has done expresses what is true. He is even allowed to swear that a writing which he did not make himself, but which some one else made and which he read at the time and knew then to be correct must necessarily be true, which is likewise an inference.

Our object in noticing these passages is merely to illustrate the way in which evidence on inference is allowed in some cases; because it seems to us that when it is thus admitted it is hardly worth while to invent reasons and strain interpretations elsewhere (of which examples have been given), in order to argue that what are really inferences can be really otherwise explained. . .

Feeling, as interest, clearly influences and determines what we attend to, and hence what we remember, and we shall have more to say on this point under the head of Prejudice [ante, No. 203]. It is with the revivability of the emotions that we are here concerned. . . . We can produce new griefs and raptures by summoning up a lively thought of their exciting cause, and though the cause is now only an idea, it produces the same organic irradiations, or almost the same, which were produced by its original, so that the emotion is again a reality. This explains why the narrative of a genuine witness is lively compared with that of a false one, who is unable to summon up even the reflection of an emotion of which he never experienced the exciting cause; for it is exceedingly difficult to imitate emotions, because of the

immense number of parts modified in each emotion. "We may catch the trick," says Professor James, "with the voluntary muscles, but fail with the skin, glands, heart, and other viscera. Just as an artificially imitated sneeze lacks something of the reality, so the attempt to imitate an emotion in the absence of its normal instigating cause is apt to be rather hollow." Feeling also affects our memories in another way: we project our present modes of experience into the past, and paint our past in the hues of the present. Thus we imagine that things which impressed us formerly must answer to what is impressive in our present stage of mental development; we unconsciously transform the past occurrence by reasoning from our present standard of what is impressive.1 . . . If we reflect on this, it would appear to afford an explanation of why a person sometimes gives contradictory accounts of the same thing; at all events, when some interval elapses between his two statements. This change of memory, as it may be termed, rather than obliviscence, might constitute a valid defense to a charge of perjury based on two contradictory depositions. . . .

Fallacies of Memory. "When I distinctly recall an event," says Professor Sully, "I am immediately sure of three things: (a) that something did really happen to me; (b) that it happened in the way I now think; (c) that it happened when it appears to have happened." Hence, there are three classes of illusion: (1) false recollections to which there correspond no real events of personal history; (2) others which misrepresent the manner of the happening of the events; (3) others which falsify the date of events remembered.

(1) The first kind is in the nature of hallucinations, and concerns imagination, the effect of which on memory has been thus described by the same writer: "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, e.g., that a man has lost a valuable scarfpin. 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 that 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 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." 2

(2) (3) But besides confusing facts with conjectures, we may also confuse experiences themselves, and this is a source of many errors. Such confusions may usually be traced to association of ideas, especially in the case of a misrecollection of dates or the mistaking of persons. How this comes about may be seen from the following: "We might find, e.g., that the two persons were associated in my mind by a link of resemblance, or

1 Sully, Illusions, p. 268.

2 Ibid., Illusions, pp. 264-265.

Simi

that I had dealings with the other person about the same time. larly, when we manage to join an event to a wrong place, we may find it is because we heard of the occurrence when staying at the particular locality, or in some other way had the image of the place closely associated in our minds with the event. But often we are wholly unable to explain the displacement." Such fallacies depend on the adulteration of pure observation with inference and conjecture. There are others due to a rather different cause, which has been termed, by Professor Stout, coalescence. Coalescence or overlapping is where an old combination or new combination is relatively so powerful as to overbear the tendency opposed to it without a struggle. . . . The gradual transformation of a story as it passes from one person to another is in part due to coalescence. Each hearer unconsciously modifies it according to his preconceived ideas and transmits it to his neighbors with this added modification. It is of course largely to guard against this that hearsay evidence is prohibited in law. Professor James describes this as one great source of the fallibility of testimony meant to be quite honest: "The most frequent source of false memory is the accounts we give to others of our experience. Such accounts we almost always make both more simple and more interesting than the truth. We quote what we should 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."

Enough perhaps has been now said to make clear the chief sources of error in memory and what in consequence must be looked for in weighing evidence.

241. F. W. COLEGROVE. Memory: An Inductive Study. (1900. p. 264.) Many helpful pedagogical suggestions were received from high school, normal, and college students in reply to question 11 [in a list of inquiries made on the subject of Memory].

"Question 11. Describe fully any aids to memory which you have found useful. How do you fix in mind and recall (a) figures, dates, dimensions; (b) forms of faces, microscopic structures, leaves, crystals, patterns, figures on the wall, carpet, or dress, phrases in music, and the cut of the dresses? (c) How do you fix and recall passages of prose and poetry, declamations, and recitations? Why and how do you memorize fine passages? In learning foreign languages, describe devices for fixing new forms and phrases. Describe your system of keeping appointments. What memorandum do you keep, what book is used, and how do you make entries? As a student, how full notes do you take in the classroom? How would you

teach a boy to remember things on time? Do you store up facts and dates, with no definite idea of how you will use them?" [Among the replies may be noted the following:]

Figures are mentally represented as clearly as possible, — a "picture of them as they look printed or written." A child thought of the figures to be carried in division as gone up in the attic"; he would "call up attic to see if anything was there." One "locates them on a certain page of a book.” Several "write them a few times." Three visualize in colored terms. Female, age 19, recalls the letter A as black on a red background. Female, 1 Sully, Illusions, p. 266.

2 Stout, Analytical Psychology, Vol. I, pp. 286–287.