Page:The Naturalisation of the Supernatural.pdf/70

50 the memory of the narrator writing after the fact of the coincidence is known, there are many errors from which the most scrupulous of witnesses can scarcely hope to hold himself altogether free. Often the percipient's experience may be coloured in retrospection by the emotion roused by the news subsequently received. In any case with the lapse of time the picture preserved in the memory is liable to be unconsciously brought more and more into conformity with the narrator's conception of what ought to have happened. One by one irrelevant details drop out, and confirmatory touches are added to heighten the tints. As the years pass, any interval which may have existed between the vision and the death tends to disappear, and the two events coalesce, like a binary star, into one. The result actually presented to us will, in such cases, bear less resemblance to a photograph than to a finished picture, in which the crudity and inadequacy of the actual are fulfilled by the unconscious craftsmanship of the imagination. No process is more difficult to detect and guard against because it is, for the most part, instinctive, and involves no conscious departure from good faith. The ability to tell the exact truth can only, as a rule, be acquired by a severe process of mental discipline.

But it would be easy to exaggerate the importance of these considerations, so far as educated witnesses are concerned. Narratives written within a few years of the event, and corroborated by the testimony of others, may, it is thought, be relied