The truth at the basis of the theory of preëxistence is simply the ideal existence of the soul, before birth, in the mind of God—that is, God’s foreknowledge of it. The intuitive ideas of which the soul finds itself in possession, such as space, time, cause, substance, right, God, are evolved from itself; in other words, man is so constituted that he perceives these truths upon proper occasions or conditions. The apparent recollection that we have seen at some past time a landscape which we know to be now for the first time before us, is an illusory putting together of fragmentary concepts or a mistaking of a part for the whole; we have seen something like a part of the landscape,—we fancy that we have seen this landscape, and the whole of it. Our recollection of a past event or scene is one whole, but this one idea may have an indefinite number of subordinate ideas existing within it. The sight of something which is similar to one of these parts suggests the past whole. Coleridge: “The great law of the imagination that likeness in part tends to become likeness of the whole.” Augustine hinted that this illusion of memory may have played an important part in developing the belief in metempsychosis. Other explanations are those of William James, in his Psychology: The brain tracts excited by the event proper, and those excited in its recall, are different; Baldwin, Psychology, 263, 264: We may remember what we have seen in a dream, or there may be a revival of ancestral or race experiences. Still others suggest that the two hemispheres of the brain act asynchronously; self-consciousness or apperception is distinguished from perception; divorce, from fatigue, of the processes of sensation and perception, causes paramnesia. Sully, Illusions, 280, speaks of an organic or atavistic memory: “May it not happen that by the law of hereditary transmission ... ancient experiences will now and then reflect themselves in our mental life, and so give rise to apparently personal recollections?” Letson, The Crowd, believes that the mob is atavistic and that it bases its action upon inherited impulses: “The inherited reflexes are atavistic memories” (quoted in Colegrove, Memory, 204).