Part 8

But now let us suppose that our witness, through the medium of his imperfect senses and his partial attention, has received a certain image. What deformations may it suffer before it is produced as his evidence? If his memory of the incident has “lapsed” the image will undergo comparatively little alteration, but if it has often been called to mind it will probably suffer a very considerable change. Each time the image is recalled it will suggest others; the creative imagination gets to work, altering the emphasis, adding particulars, obliterating others, and the result will be as much a work of art as the reproduction of a fact. This tendency is particularly to be noticed with women, and with certain “excitable” types; it may be almost a national characteristic, as with Gascons and Sicilians. But all witnesses are prone to this kind of inaccuracy. Where the event has often been narrated by the witness the deformations become even more serious. For he is here exposed not only to the suggestions of his own creative imagination, but to the suggestions of other people. Every one wishes to make a success of the story he is telling, and the perception of what points to stress and what details to add is wonderfully ready and alert. It has often happened that a witness of perfect good faith has changed from the simple spectator of a drama to a prominent actor in it under the influence of repeated narration. Finally, we reach the point when the witness has to bear his formal testimony. His observations were imperfect, he has imperfectly remembered them, his imagination has distorted them, and he is now to express them. A very considerable additional source of inaccuracy is likely to enter here. The witness probably cannot express his complete image--words may not be sufficiently precise to render the fine shades of his remembered perceptions. The nature of a sound, the kind of emotion expressed by a voice,--he may have no words for such things. And, in any case, the witness will not express his complete image. He will select--in accordance with his own estimate of what is pertinent and what trivial. He will do this even if he be allowed to talk to his heart’s content; but the method of question and answer as pursued in our Law Courts leads to even more imperfect expression. For he is forced to be precise where his recollection is vague, and he will either give a false precision to his answer or else profess complete ignorance. More often still the witness sins by exaggeration, and these exaggerations, in a thousand subtle ways, usually tend to add to his own importance. And it is important to notice that, besides tending to import fictitious details, the witness will tend to exaggerate his degree of conviction. Where he was originally doubtful he is now perfectly sure.

So far we have been considering the witness in isolation, and we have not considered the reaction upon his testimony of the emotional state produced in him by the event. Yet the emotions accompanying the event have a great bearing upon the value of the witness’s testimony. During the war it was noticed that the evidence of soldiers freshly wounded was often of the most fantastic description. They would testify to the details of catastrophes which had never occurred; they would assert that so-and-so had been decapitated in front of their eyes, and so-and-so buried by an explosion, when, as a matter of fact, nothing remotely resembling these events had taken place. And, under the influence of the comparatively slighter emotions of a spiritualistic séance, people will identify the same “materialised” mask as the features of their husbands, wives, sons, daughters. Under the influence of such emotions it may be taken as a general rule that perceptions deteriorate, and illegitimate inference, “unconscious reasoning,” becomes more marked. Unconscious reasoning, indeed, plays a very great part in nearly all cases of mal-observation. It is well exemplified in the statement of the man sitting in a dark wood: “That dog’s bark is not really a grasshopper, it is the squeaking of a cart.” And Dr. Locard tells of one experiment he made, while in the Army, with a barometer which bore a remote resemblance to a clock. His suggestion that it was a clock was invariably accepted, even by the most eminent people, and several of them acquired their knowledge of the time of day from its indications, even when the hour so indicated was highly improbable. The testimony of great and commanding figures, even to the time of day, may therefore be open to suspicion. But the immense part played by unconscious reasoning is best seen in the psychology of conjuring, under which head it is fair to group the great majority of alleged spiritualistic phenomena. In this latter case we have further to recognise what Freud calls the “pleasure-pain principle,” as distinguished from the “reality-principle.” In other words, the witnesses are seldom disinterested; they strongly desire to witness certain events rather than others, and in such cases the slightest suggestion is sufficient to produce conviction.

When the witness is not isolated, but is a member of a group, the defects we have before noted, due to the creative imagination, are likely to be accentuated. The event will have been discussed and a uniform version gradually prepared. It is almost impossible, from the unanimous testimony of a number of witnesses who have been in consultation, to extract the original perceptions. The phenomenon of mimétisme testimonial makes its appearance, and may assume abnormal dimensions. A kind of collective hysteria may be induced, and there can be little doubt that some of the collective denunciations of witches which took place in the Middle Ages were manifestations of this form of mimicry.

Such are some of the results that have been reached by the modern investigations of the value of human testimony. They tell us little we did not know before, for mankind has had an immense experience of human testimony; but they make our knowledge more precise and enable us to see what kinds of testimony are most open to suspicion. The effect of these researches on judicial procedure should be considerable, and their influence on the study of history not less marked. On this latter subject their influence can only be indirect, and in the direction, probably, of throwing still more doubt on the accuracy of historical records. The “credibility” of a witness still remains a vague quantity, but the chances are that it is something less than the value hitherto assigned to it. The investigation can claim no such precise results as those enunciated by Craig in 1699 in his Theologiæ Christianæ Principia mathematica, where, after proving that the suspicions of any history vary in the duplicate ratio of the times taken from the beginning of the history, he shows that faith in the Gospel, so far as it depended on oral tradition, expired about the year 880, and, so far as it depended on written tradition, would expire in the year 3150. The new investigations of the value of human testimony start from humbler, but surer, foundations.

Printed in Great Britain by Butler & Tanner, Frome and London

=TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES=

Simple typographical errors have been silently corrected; unbalanced quotation marks were remedied when the change was obvious, and otherwise left unbalanced.

Punctuation, hyphenation, and spelling were made consistent when a predominant preference was found in the original book; otherwise they were not changed.