[Illusions by James Sully]@TWC D-Link bookIllusions CHAPTER X 37/77
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. Not only is there this general deficiency in mnemonic representation, there are special deficiencies due to the fact of oblivescence.
Our memories restore us only fragments of our past life.
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