Capitalists and financiers -- Fiction; Criminals -- Fiction; Wall Street (New York, N.Y.) -- Fiction
“Oh, well, it merely means that progressive people keep posted. Here,
let me read you what Henry Rutgers Marshall, an American psychologist,
better known to the learned bodies of Europe than to benighted
compatriots like you, has to say about this. I copied it:
“_Few of our memories are in any measure fully accurate as records; and
under certain conditions, which arise more frequently than most of
us realize, the characteristics of the memory-experience may appear in
connection with images, or series of images, which are not revivals
of any actual past events. In such cases the man who has such a
memory-experience, automatically following his usual mode of thought,
accepts it as the revival record of an actual occurrence in his past
life. When we are convinced that this is not the case we say that he has
suffered from an 'illusion of memory.'_”
_“The term 'illusion of memory' thus appears to be something of a
misnomer. What we are really dealing with is a real memory-experience,
but one by which we are led to make a false judgment--and this because
the judgment, which in this special case is false, is almost invariably
fully justified._
_“A man of unquestioned probity is thus often led to make statements in
regard to his experience in the past that have not the least foundation
in fact.”_
“But, when Garrettson came out of his house do you mean to say he
wouldn't notice a different coachman?” Kidder looked incredulous in
advance of the answer.
“He wouldn't be looking for a different coachman and, therefore, he
wouldn't find one. The imitation was close enough to show nothing
unusual, nothing different. A lifelong habit never develops
introspective misgivings. No, my boy; Garrettson never noticed. Of
course the coachman drove to some place or other and left the great
financier a prisoner in the cab.”
“How?”
“By making the door of the coupé impossible to open from the inside,
so that Garrettson was compelled finally to climb out of the window, a
matter of some difficulty to a man of his years and weight. The rest you
know.”
“I don't.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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