Page:The Works of H G Wells Volume 4.pdf/391

 us take up a critical attitude even towards our own memories; we know that they not only sometimes drop things out, but that sometimes a sort of dreaming or a strong suggestion will put things in. But for all that, memory remains vivid and real as no other knowledge can be, and to have seen and heard and felt is to be nearest to absolute conviction. Yet our memory of direct impressions is only the smallest part of what we know. Outside that bright area comes knowledge of a different order—the knowledge brought to us by other people. Outside our immediate personal memory there comes this wider area of facts or quasi-facts told us by more or less trustworthy people, told us by word of mouth or by the written word of living and of dead writers. This is the past of report, rumour, tradition, and history—the second sort of knowledge of the past. The nearer knowledge of this sort is abundant and clear and detailed, remoter it becomes vaguer, still more remotely in time and space it dies down to brief, imperfect inscriptions and enigmatical traditions, and at last dies away, so far as the records and traditions of humanity go, into a doubt and darkness as blank, just as blank, as futurity.

And now let me remind you that this second zone of knowledge outside the bright area of what we have felt and witnessed and handled for ourselves—this zone of hearsay and history and tradition—completed the whole knowledge of the past that was accessible to Shakespeare, for example. To these limits man's knowledge of the past was absolutely confined, save for some inklings and guesses, save for