INSTINCTIVE EVIDENCE.
THIS Orton delusion is psychologically so curious, that almost any hint which may serve to explain it becomes interesting, and a reporter of the Daily News supplies one. He has visited Prittlewell, and discovered that the now famous petition from that dreary parish had been got up by a local grocer, who had been a ploughman, and who, when asked the grounds of his firm faith in Sir Roger, first answered, on the plod omnibus principle, that fourteen hundred had signed it, and it " waent likely the whole fourteen hundred of us could be wrong," and then fell back on his final proof:—" 'Now,' said Mr. Howard, evidently by way of clinching the argument, 'let me ask you one question,—Are you a father of a family ?' I replied that I was. 'Then,' said he, what would you think if your wife was to say, "That's my child," and somebody was to say, "No, he's not?" The question being put in this simple form, I was compelled to admit that I should attach considerable importance to my wife's opinion in a matter of that kind, and hence I am afraid that I left Mr. Howard under the impression that if I had had any linger- ing doubts of the accuracy of his views on the subject, he had once and for ever removed them from my mind." The worthy grocer evidently believed that he had produced an irrefragable argument, before which his interlocutor must perforce retire—as he did—knowing well the uselessness of fighting any sentimental superstition resting on the observation of ages ; and his belief is shared, we suspect, by a majority of his countrymen. Whenever a reasonable Tichbornite—we mean a Tichbornite who intends to be reasonable—is pressed to his last defences, he in- variably cries out in an exulting manner, "Would not a mother know her child?" and feels as triumphant as an Evangelical minis- ter when, being clearly in the wrong, he has produced a text from the Old Testament apparently on his side. He appeals, in fact, to evidence beyond reason, to inspired evidence, to an instinct which, as he thinks, nature has implanted in every mother's heart, and which enables her, in spite of years, of physical alterations, and of evidence to the contrary, to recognise her offspring. This instinct is in no way a result of reason, of acquaintance, or of that general body of impressions which occasionally carry convic- tion we cannot tell why—as, for instance, they occasionally-tell us, or seem to tell us, of the presence of an enemy, or less fre- quently, of one sure to be a friend—but is a causeless natural emotion, or rather, an emotion caused by a special relation- ship, and therefore a special physical affinity., This impression is so widely spread, is so nearly universal—for example, it is the basis of the Judgment of Solomon, that queer bit of savage autocratic reeklessness so celebrated in all lands—that it is worth examining for a moment what is the evidence, apart from the Tichbome case, that a mother would know her son at all more easily than any other person equally familiar with the object ? We should say, none at all, were we not aware that the con- ditions of the question as we have put them are just a little unfair. No one except in a few instances a foster-mother can have quite the same degree of acquaintance with a child as its mother has. No other relation covers quite so much time, or produces such minute attention, or quickens the memory—most variable of all mental faculties—to such perennial clearness. Be memory what it may, affection stimulates it even more than hate. No other, moreover, supplies to the memory so many accidental aids. A foster-mother would remember the trick of her nursling's smile, the expression of his eyes—a nearlynnchanging feature—the turn of his limbs when in repose, little gestures, small failures of physical response—for instance, some children never indicate physically that they are attending, while others always do—but even she would miss some traits that the mother would perceive, traits depending on likenesses to the father, to the maternal grandmother, to brothers or sisters, to all manner of relatives, whose external features and ways the mother knows in a way the foster-mother, except under most unusual circum- stances, cannot do. The laws of reminiscence, as distinguished from memory, have never been studied with sufficient care ; but clearly there are unconscious reminiscences which may influence a mother whose experience, as regards her child's ancestors, is so separate, very strongly. We may even go a step further, into a region so little explored that anything said about it must be somewhat cloudy and mystical, and allow that a mother may have an advantage in recognising a child that is shared by the father alone, and then in an inferior degree. Every child must bear, visibly or invisibly, some physical relation to its mother, and the mother may perceive, when no one else can, features or transient ex- pressions of feature which recall her own, or more frequently which are what—with the strange memory people have for themselves, a memory so luminous and yet so inaccurate—she recognises her- self formerly to have been. If the mother has a fair chance, if she is not deceiving the world, or deluded by a sovereign desire, if she has had time enough of her child's company to see its limbs set and assume the tone, so to speak, that they will retain through life, these aids make her testimony almost invaluable ; but these aids are merely aids to an excited memory, which may, never- theless, be deceived. The memory forgets nothing, though it appears to forget, and in the mother the photographic plate is more readily quickened to reveal what it retains. Of the infalli- ble test, which is apart from memory, which needs no companion- ship, which is independent of evidence, of sight, of hearing, of touch, in which the populace believe with the faith that ballad- mongers and novelists have found so convenient, and therefore have so developed, there is no proof whatever, no evidence that relation- ship however near has a revealing force of its own. The armoured son strikes the armoured father down in battle with no super- natural thrill. The positive proof of the negative proposition is of course difficult, but we believe that in workhouses mismkea are not unknown ; that in lying-in hospitals precautions are needful to identify babies, that in the old days of the Foundling Hospital most painful failures of identification were recorded, that some of the thousand stories of changed children are indubi- tably true. About children parted from the mother at an early age, but not in babyhood—as, for instance, the children of Anglo- Indians—there is a good deal of evidence, and we believe it is to this effect :—When the child retains its early characteristics, or is very like the father, the mother knows it at once ; but when the characteristics have altered—when, as constantly happens, the child, who in babyhood had the traits of a fair-haired ancestor, in youth assumes those of a darker progenitor, the mother is as much at sea as anybody else, and rather more so, because her remembrance being the remembrance of a little child and not of a grown youngster or half-formed woman, is leading her astray. The storge does not help her a bit, any more than it helps, or appears to help—for, of course, all human knowledge on that point is imperfect—any inferior animal. Child and parent learn to recognise each other gradually, and unfortunately, if the separation has been long, judge each other like third persons, though with the additional keenness, it may be of sympathy, it may be of criticism, natural to their close intimacy. Natural affection counts for much in smoothing away all difficulties, in reconciling, as it were, each to each ; but it counts for nothingox- cept in so far as it quickens memory, in helping recognition. Solomon's Judgment did not test relationship—the true mother being supposed to have known her babe—but only comparative affection. It is memory which is at work, not instinct, and the consensus of the human race to the contrary, even were it perfect, as it is not, as witness the Greek legend of (Mints and his mother Jocasta, would only be another proof of the errors into which humanity falls from insisting on imagining, instead of discovering, a cause for a frequent effect. No illusion is so incurable or so long-lived as one which is based on im- perfect physiology, yet gratifies either the conscience or the heart.
While, however, we should question greatly the revealing power of affinity even in the case of mother and child, and deny it altogether in that of slightly more distant relatives, we feel greatly less confident as to that of mental association, and should be apt to suspect the good faith either of mother or of wife who recognised an impostor. Where the mother has brought up the child, or the wife lived long with the husband, there must be acquired some knowledge of individualisms of character which one would think it impossible to forget. The persistent belief of most people that character can change, whereas it can only alter by development—that is, either by growth or decay—blinds the judgment of all a little, and none but the most intimate have ever sufficient grounds for certainty. They see so little of the latent character, that if it suddenly comes to the front they may alto- gether be deceived. But the wife or mother, time being granted, and the habit of attention natural to the relation, must see so much of the truth, of the nuances of mental action, of the current of the character—that which leads us to know what a man will do when he spills a hot cup of tea over his legs—that it is difficult to imagine a complete forgetfulness, or at all events an absence of occasional violent suspicion. There are tricks in a man's character, as in his gait and gesture, capacities of -being pleased, forms of irritability, ways of judging cases before him, which it must be very difficult for any one once intimate with him, and provoked every day to speculation on him, completely to for- get. Penelope, one would think, would have had a difficulty in recognising, or at all events continuing to recognise, a rash im- postor, however like her many-counselled lord. It is hard for the cultivated to believe that all such peculiarities could be forgotten, and a gentle man mistaken for a violent one, or a brave man for a timid one—the converse of this is easy, as a brave man may lose his nerve—or a quick man for a slow one ; but still such things have occurred, and we suspect analysts have little conception of the feebleness with which many minds observe, or of the evanescent character of the impressions which the majority retain. They are like artists, who cannot understand mistakes as to identity, when the impression of the right man's personality is printed so clearly on their own brains. A certain degree of the faculty of concentration is necessary for certainty as to the identity even of friends, but where that is present, and an im- postor recognised by wife or mother, we should always at heart suspect either an overturned brain, or. a diseased imagination,. or an inclination to believe so strong that the will compresses the intellect, and keeps it, as it often does, from exercising itself as it would.
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