Illusions by James Sully (story reading txt) 📕

These so-called philosophical illusions will be found, like the vulgar ones just spoken of, to illustrate the distinction drawn between passive and active illusions. That is to say, the alleged misreading of individual consciousness would result now from a confusion of distinct elements, including wrong suggestion, due to the intricacies of the phenomena, now from a powerful predisposition to read something into the phenomena.

A kind of illusion in which the passive element seems most conspicuous would be the error into which the interrogator of the individual consciousness is said to fall respecting simple unanalyzable states of mind. On the face of it, it is not likely that a mere inward glance at the tangle of conscious states should suffice to determine what is such a perfectly simple mental phenomenon. Accordingly, when a writer declares that an act of introspection demonstrates the simple unanalyzable character of such a feeling as the sentiment of beauty or that of moral approval, the opponent of this view clearly has some show of argument for saying that this simplicity may be altogether illusory and due to the absence of a perfect act of attention. Similarly, when it is said that the idea of space contains no representations of muscular sensation, the statement may clearly arise from the want of a sufficiently careful kind of introspective analysis.[105]

In most cases of these alleged philosophical errors, however, the active and passive factors seem to combine. There are certain intricacies in the mental phenomenon itself favouring the chances of error, and there are independent predispositions leading the mind to look at the phenomenon in a wrong way. This seems to apply to the famous declaration of a certain school of thinkers that by an act of introspection we can intuit the fact of liberty, that is to say, a power of spontaneous determination of action superior to and regulative of the influence of motives. It may be plausibly contended that this idea arises partly from a mixing up of facts of present consciousness with inferences from them, and partly from a natural predisposition of the mind to invest itself with this supreme power of absolute origination.[106]

In a similar way, it might be contended that other famous philosophic dicta are founded on a process of erroneous introspection of subjective mental states. In some cases, indeed, it seems a plausible explanation to regard these illusions as mere survivals in attenuated shadowy form of grosser popular illusions. But this is not yet the time to enter on these, which, moreover, hardly fall perhaps under our definition of an illusion of introspection.

Value of the Introspective Method.

In drawing up this rough sketch of the illusions of introspection, I have had no practical object in view. I have tried to look at the facts as they are apart from any conclusions to be drawn from them. The question how far the liability to error in any region of inquiry vitiates the whole process is a difficult one; and the question whether the illusions to which we are subject in introspection materially affect the value of self-knowledge as a whole and consequently of the introspective method in psychology, as many affirm, is too subtle a one to be fully treated now. All that I shall attempt here is to show that it does not do this any more than the risk of sense-illusion can be said materially to affect the value of external observation.

It is to be noted first of all that the errors of introspection are much more limited than those of sense-perception. They broadly answer to the slight errors connected with the discrimination and recognition of the sense-impression. There is nothing answering to a complete hallucination in the sphere of the inner mental life. It follows, too, from what has been said above, that the amount of active error in introspection is insignificant, since the representation of a feeling or belief is so very similar to the actual experience of it.

In brief, the errors of introspection, though numerous, are all too slight to render the process of introspection as a whole unsound and untrustworthy. Though, as we have seen, it involves, strictly speaking, an ingredient of representation, this fact does not do away with the broad distinction between presentative and representative cognition. Introspection is presentative in the sense that the reality constituting the object of cognition, the mind's present feeling, is as directly present to the knowing mind as anything can be conceived to be. It may be added that the power of introspection is a comparatively new acquisition of the human race, and that, as it improves, the amount of error connected with its operation may reasonably be expected to become infinitesimal.

It is often supposed by those who undervalue the introspective method in psychology that there is a special difficulty in the detection of error in introspection, owing to the fact that the object of inspection is something individual and private, and not open to common scrutiny as the object of external perception. Yet, while allowing a certain force to this objection I would point out, first of all, that even in sense-perception, what the individual mind is immediately certain of is its own sensations. The relatively perfect certainty which finally attaches to the presentative side of sense-perception is precisely that which finally attaches to the results of introspection.

In the second place, it may be said that the contrast between the inner and the outer experience is much less than it seems. In many cases our emotions are the direct result of a common external cause, and even when they are not thus attached to some present external circumstance, we are able, it is admitted, by the use of language, roughly to compare our individual feelings. And such comparison is continually bringing to light the fact that there is a continuity in our mental structure, that our highest thoughts and emotions lead us back to our common sense-impressions, and that consequently, in spite of all individual differences of temperament and mental organization, our inner experience is in all its larger features a common experience.

I may add that this supposition of the common nature of our internal experience, as a whole, not only underlies the science of psychology, but is implied in the very process of detecting and correcting errors of introspection. I do not mean that in matters of feeling "authority" is to override "private judgment." Our last resort with respect to things of the mind is, as I have said, that of careful self-inspection. And the progress of psychology and the correction of illusion proceed by means of an ever-improving exercise of the introspective faculty. Yet such individual inspection can at least be guided by the results of others' similar inspection, and should be so guided as soon as a general consensus in matters of internal experience is fairly made out. In point of fact, the preceding discussion of illusions of introspection has plainly rested on the sufficiently verified assumption that the calmest and most efficient kind of introspection, in bringing to light what is permanent as compared with what is variable in the individual cognition, points in the direction of a common body of introspected fact.

Besides the perception of external objects, and the inspection of our internal mental states, there are other forms of quasi-presentative cognition which need to be touched on here, inasmuch as they are sometimes erroneous and illusory.

In the last chapter I alluded to the fact that emotion may arise as the immediate accompaniment of a sense-impression. When this is the case there is a disposition to read into the external object a quality answering to the emotion, just as there is a disposition to ascribe to objects qualities of heat and cold answering to the sensations thus called. And such a reference of an emotional result to an external exciting cause approximates in character to an immediate intuition. The cognition of the quality is instantaneous, and quite free from any admixture of conscious inference. Accordingly, we have to inquire into the illusory forms of such intuition, if such there be.

Æsthetic Intuition.

Conspicuous among these quasi-presentative emotional cognitions is æsthetic intuition, that is to say, the perception of an object as beautiful. It is not necessary here to raise the question whether there is, strictly speaking, any quality in things answering to the sentiment of beauty in our minds: this is a philosophical and not a psychological question, and turns on the further question, what we mean by object. All that we need to assume here is that there are certain aspects of external things, certain relations of form, together with a power of exciting certain pleasurable ideas in the spectator's mind, which are commonly recognized as the cause of the emotion of beauty, and indeed regarded as constituting the embodiments of the objective quality, beauty. Æsthetic intuition thus clearly implies the immediate assurance of the existence of a common source of æsthetic delight, a source bound up with an object of common sense-perception. And so we may say that to call a thing beautiful is more or less distinctly to recognize it as a cause of a present emotion, and to attribute to it a power of raising a kindred emotion in other minds.

Æsthetic Illusion.

According to this view of the matter, an illusion of æsthetic intuition would arise whenever this power of affecting a number of minds pleasurably is wrongly attributed, by an act of "intuition," to an object of sense-perception, on the ground of a present personal feeling.

Now, this error is by no means unfrequent. Our delight in viewing external things, though agreeing up to a certain point, does not agree throughout. It is a trite remark that there is a large individual factor, a considerable "personal equation," in matters of taste, as in other matters. Permanent differences of natural sensibility, of experience, of intellectual habits, and so on, make an object æsthetically impressive and valuable to one man and not to another. Yet these differences tend to be overlooked. The individual mind, filled with delight at some spectacle, automatically projects its feeling outwards in the shape of a cause of a common sentiment. And the force of this impulse cannot be altogether explained as the effect of past experiences and of association. It seems to involve, in addition, the play of social instincts, the impulse of the individual mind to connect itself in sympathy with the collective mind.

Here, as in the other varieties of illusion already treated of, we may distinguish between a passive and an active side; only in this case the passive side must not be taken as corresponding to any common suggestions of the object, as in the case of perception proper. So far as an illusion of æsthetic intuition may be considered as passive, it must be due to the effect of circumscribed individual associations with the object.

All agree that what is called beauty consists, to a considerable extent, of a power of awaking pleasant suggestions, but in order that these should constitute a ground of æsthetic value, they must be common, participated in by all, or at least by an indefinite number. This will be the case when the association rests on our common every-day experiences, and our common knowledge of things, as in the case of the peaceful beauty of an ascending curl of blue smoke in a woody landscape, or the awful beauty of