that he hears now. He will not know whether or not he treads on precisely the same spots on the pavement as before, and laces his stick on the same; he will not now whether the currents of air meet him in precisely the same places; and he will not know whether or not the same associations pass through his mind in precisely the same order. Now, if this be so when a man repeats, as nearly as the changes of the external world admit, the same experiences within three minutes, for the very purpose of recognizing all that is recognizable, and discriminating what is different, — it stands to reason that in a review of life, however vivid it may be, occurring many years after most of the events reviewed, it would be simply impossible to say whether all the images which pass in vision before you are or are not real memorial pictures of your former experience. If your original perceptions are so vague, — as in ninety-nine cases out of every hundred of half-attentive perception they are, — that within the next five minutes you are unable to say whether they are repeated accurately or not, how is it conceivable that under any spell whatever you can be quite sure that they have been repeated accurately at the interval of many ears? We can only remember distinctly what we have vividly experienced. If the first experience is blurred and faint, the best conceivable return of it to memory must be blurred and faint also; nor can we usually, in the case of a blurred and faint first-hand experience, recall, even immediately, the degree in which each part of the image was thus blurred and faint. We confess, therefore, that we agree with Mr. Verdon in entertaining the profoundest doubt of the truth of the now rather common assumption that memory may one day restore to our recognition every experience of our past life. We should say that a very large part of life is consumed in experiences so little unique and so very like thousands of other experiences, that even it they did recur to our mind's eye in precisely the same form as before, we should be unable to affirm with confidence that they were the same. If the twenty thousand dinners that a middle-aged man had eaten were all to be paraded with the most faithful accuracy before his imagination, how is he, who probably hesitates in the witness-box whether or not the claimant before him be his own old friend or an impostor who closely resembles him, to swear to their identity? There are no doubt such things as infallible attestations of memory. if five minutes ago l were meditating a great crime or a great deed of any sort, I know that this was so, as well as I know where I am now. But as to ninety-nine hundredths of the minutiæ of human existence, memory, even when fresh, refuses to attest anything with absolute certainty. And it is at least exceedingly diflicult, even if not quite impossible, to suppose that what memory could not attest at all when the event on which it was questioned was quite fresh, it could infallibly attest when that event was the vanishing point of a long past.
We hold, then, with Mr. Verdon that there is no real ground for supposing that all past states of consciousness must be recoverable and identifiable by us as the veritable states through which we actually passed. As a general rule, it is only moments of somewhat vividly concentrated life that we can positively attest in memory at any great distance of time; while common and commonplace experiences can hardly be discriminated clearly from each other even at the shortest intervals. We believe that in every man's life there are not only many experiences which have not been distinct enough when they occurred to be clearly and faithfully remembered, but also many which are so often partially repeated without critical and momentous differences, that even the most complete restoration of some of them in consciousness could not be identified individually, but only as types.
But nothing that we have said must be interpreted as throwing any doubt on the well-established fact that what has once been thoroughly well known, though since apparently quite forgotten, in consequence of the displacing power of new associations and new habits, may be brought back into full recollection again by any circumstances, — such, for instance, as those of a fever, — which in their turn obliterate the more immediate present, and set the mind working again in the old grooves. Nobody can doubt the truth of some of the stories of people who in illness have repeated sentences from a language quite unknown to them in their ordinary state, but which, as is subsequently ascertained, were impressed on their ear in childhood or youth, by hearing them constantly repeated, till at last these sentences had become as familiar to them as the inarticulate cries of London are to one who has long lived in the London streets, cries which, in like manner, disappear from the memory, so soon as the ear ceases to be familiar with them. And these stories certainly prove that anything which has
