On the other hand, in more healthy states of mind there presents itself an exactly opposite tendency, namely, an impulse of the will to banish whatever when recalled gives pain to the furthest conceivable regions of the past.  Thus, when we have lost something we cherished dearly, and the recollection of it brings fruitless longing, we instinctively seek to expel the recollection from our minds.  The very feeling that what has been can never again be, seems to induce this idea of a vast remoteness of the vanished reality.  When, moreover, the lost object was fitted to call forth the emotion of reverence, the impulse to magnify the remoteness of the loss may not improbably be reinforced by the circumstance that everything belonging to the distant past 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.