The kind of illusion of memory which thus depends on the spontaneous or independent activity of present imagination is strikingly illustrated in the curious cases of mistaken identity with which the proceedings of our law courts supply us from time to time.  When a witness in good faith, but erroneously, affirms that a man is the same as an old acquaintance of his, we may feel sure that there is some striking point or points of similarity between the two persons.  But this of itself would only partly account for the illusion, since we often see new faces that, by a number of curious points of affinity, call up in a tantalizing way old and familiar ones.  What helps in this case to produce the illusion is the preconception that the present man is the witness’s old friend.  That is to say, his recollection is partly true, though largely false.  He does really recall the similar feature, movement, or tone of voice; he only seems to himself to recall the rest of his friend’s appearance; for, to speak correctly, he projects the present impression into the past, and constructs his friend’s face out of elements supplied by the new one.  Owing to this cause, an illusion of memory is apt to multiply itself, one man’s assertion of what happened producing by contagion a counterfeit of memory’s record in other minds.

I said just now that we tend to project our present modes of experience into the past.  We paint our past in the hues of the present.  Thus we imagine that things which impressed us in some remote period of life must answer to what is impressive in our present stage of mental development.  For example, a person recalls a hill near the home of his childhood, and has the conviction that it was of great height.  On revisiting the place he finds that the eminence is quite insignificant.  How can we account for this?  For one thing, it is to be observed that to his undeveloped childish muscles the climbing to the top meant a considerable expenditure of energy, to be followed by a sense of fatigue.  The man remembers these feelings, and “unconsciously reasoning” by present experience, that is to say, by the amount of walking which would now produce this sense of fatigue, imagines that the height was vastly greater than it really was.  Another reason is, of course, that a wider knowledge of mountains has resulted in a great alteration of the man’s standard of height.

From this cause arises a tendency generally to exaggerate the impressions of early life.  Youth is the period of novel effects, when all the world is fresh, and new and striking impressions crowd in thickly on the mind.  Consequently, it takes much less to produce a given amount of mental excitation in childhood than in after-life.  In looking back on this part of our history, we recall for the most part just those events and scenes which deeply stirred our minds by their strangeness, novelty, etc., and so impressed themselves on the tablet of our memory; and it is