Modern science suggests another possible source of these distinct spectra of memory.  May it not happen that, by the law of hereditary transmission, which is now being applied to mental as well as bodily phenomena, ancestral experiences will now and then reflect themselves in our mental life, and so give rise to apparently personal recollections?  No one can say that this is not 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 type of conscious experience.  Just as the eye sees no gap in its field of vision corresponding to the “blind spot” of the retina, but carries its impression over this area, so memory sees no lacuna in the past, but carries its image of conscious life over each of the forgotten spaces.