Enough has now been said, perhaps, to show in how many ways our retrospective imagination transforms the actual events of our past life. So thoroughly, indeed, do the relics of this past get shaken together in new kaleidoscopic combinations, so much of the result of later experiences gets imported into our early years, that it may well be asked whether, if the record of our actual life were ever read out to us, we should be able to recognize it. It looks as though we could be sure of recalling only recent events with any degree of accuracy and completeness. As soon as they recede at any considerable distance from us, they are subject to a sort of atmospheric effect. Much grows indistinct and drops altogether out of sight, and what is still seen often takes a new and grotesquely unlike shape. More than this, the play of fancy, like the action of some refracting medium, bends and distorts the outlines of memory's objects, making them wholly unlike the originals. _Hallucinations of Memory._ We will now go on to the third class of mnemonic error, which I have called the spectra of memory, where there is not simply a transformation of the past event, but a complete imaginative creation of it. This class of error corresponds, as I have observed, to an hallucination in the region of sense-perception. And just as we distinguished between those hallucinations of sense which arise first of all through some peripherally caused subjective sensation, and those which want even this element of reality and depend altogether on the activity of imagination, so we may mark off two classes of mnemonic hallucination. The false recollection may correspond to something past--and to this extent be a recollection--though not to any objective fact, but only to a subjective representation of such a fact, as, for example, a dream. In this case the imitation of the mnemonic process may be very definite and complete. Or the false recollection may be wholly a retrojection of a present mental image, and so by no stretch of language be deserving of the name recollection. It is doubtful whether by any effort of will a person could bring himself to regard a figment of his present imagination as representative of a past reality. Definite and complete hallucinations of this sort do not in normal circumstances arise. It seems necessary for a complete illusion of memory that there should be something past and recovered at the moment, though this may not be a real personal experience.[127] On the other hand, it is possible, as we shall presently see, under certain circumstances, to create out of present materials, and in a vague and indefinite shape, pure phantoms of past experience, that is to say, quasi-mnemonic images to which there correspond no past occurrences whatever.