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.
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.