to myself been filled up by this unconscious process of shifting and rearrangement, and the idea of another person has by some odd accident got substituted for that of the real borrower.  If we could go deeply enough into the matter, we should, of course, be able to explain why this particular confusion arose.  We might find, for example, that the two persons were associated in my mind by a link of resemblance, or that I had dealings with the other person about the same time.  Similarly, when we manage to join an event to a wrong place, we may find that 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.

So far I have been speaking of the passive processes by which the past comes to wear a new face to our imaginations.  In these our present habits of feeling and thinking take no part; all is the work of the past, of the decay of memory, and the gradual confusion of images.  This process of disorganization may be likened to the action of damp on some old manuscript, obliterating some parts, altering the appearance of others, and even dislocating certain portions.  Besides this passive process of transformation, there is a more active one in which our present minds co-operate.  In memory, as in perception and introspection, there is a process of preparation or preadjustment of mind, and here will be found room for what I had called active error.  This may be illustrated by the operation of “interpreting” an old manuscript which has got partially obliterated, or of “restoring” a faded picture; in each of which operations error will be pretty sure to creep in through an importation of the restorer’s own ideas into the relic of the past.

Just as when distant objects are seen mistily our imaginations come into play, leading us to fancy that we see something completely and distinctly, so when the images of memory become dim, our present imagination helps to restore them, putting a new patch into the old garment.  If only there is some relic of the past event preserved, a bare suggestion of the way in which it may have happened will often suffice to produce the conviction that it actually did happen in this way.  The suggestions that naturally arise in our minds at such times will bear the stamp of our present modes of experience and habits of thought.  Hence, in trying to reconstruct the remote past, we are constantly in danger of importing our present selves into our past selves.