Our quarrel with popular psychology goes further still. _The whole notion that a memory-idea is a copy of past experience is wrong_; the idea may copy the perception, but it need not; and usually it does not. You remember that, after we had formulated our own law of mental connection, we introduced the catch-phrase ‘marriage by proxy’; and you remember why. What, now, is the essential thing about a memory-idea? Not, surely, that it should copy past experience, but that it should _mean_ past experience. Our individual equipment of images is so variable (p. 139) that we should be very badly off if we were limited, in what we remember, to copies of our perceptions; _A_, who has no visual images, could then remember nothing that he had seen, and _B_, who has no auditory images, could remember nothing that he had heard! Such are the straits to which popular psychology must logically reduce us. In point of fact, _A_ remembers well enough what he has seen; only, the visual parts of his experience are translated into other modes, perhaps verbal-motor. In that event a verbal-motor image, set in the right context and accompanied by a feeling of familiarity, may mean for _A_ some visual object that he perceived so many years since. It goes flat against common sense to assert that a verbal-motor image is the ‘memory’ of the visual perception; and yet that is just what the verbal-motor image, in its present setting, actually is. _This translation of perception into imagery of another mode has curious consequences._ I may declare positively that I remember having heard Patti sing forty years ago, when all that I really remember is the statement itself, the form of words which carries my meaning. Nay more, if my mind is of the imaginal type, I may have taken my cue from the verbal statement, and have conjured up a mental picture of the performance, a picture now so familiar that I could swear to the pink dress,—were it not that a contemporary notice writes it down as cream! _Words often repeated are in this way highly deceptive_; and there is good psychology in the story of the traveller who told his romantic tales so often that he finally believed them himself. Many of us, if we would but confess it, remember things that happened before we were born; the account of them was impressed on us in childhood, and was later bodied forth in images; and now their ideas bear the memory-label. Here, then, is one source of the ‘untrustworthiness’ of memory, which is at the same time a possible source of the Platonic doctrine of reminiscence.