For the rest it is confined to those facts and events of general interest to which our social habits lead us repeatedly to go back.[116] The consciousness of personal identity is said to be bound up with memory.

That is to say, I am conscious of a continuous permanent self under all the varying surface-play of the stream of consciousness, just because I can, by an act of recollection, bring together any two portions of this stream of experience, and so recognize the unbroken continuity of the whole.

If this is so, it would seem to follow from the very fragmentary character of our recollections that our sense of identity is very incomplete.

As we shall see presently, there is good reason to look upon, this consciousness of continuous personal existence as resting only in part on memory, and mainly on our independently formed representation of what has happened in the numberless and often huge lacunae of the past left by memory.
Having thus a rough idea of the mechanism of memory to guide us, we may be able to investigate the illusions incident to the process.
_Illusions of Memory._ By an illusion of memory we are to understand a false recollection or a wrong reference of an idea to some region of the past.

It might, perhaps, be roughly described as a wrong interpretation of a special kind of mental image, namely, what I have called a mnemonic image.
Mnemonic illusion is thus distinct from mere forgetfulness or imperfect memory.