Illusions by James Sully (story reading txt) 📕

At the close of our study of illusions we shall return to this point. We shall there inquire into the connection between those illusions which are popularly recognized as such, and those which first come into view or appear to do so (for we must not yet assume that there are such) after a certain kind of philosophic reflection. And some attempt will be made to determine roughly how far the process of dissolving these substantial beliefs of mankind into airy phantasms may venture to go.

For the present, however, these so-called illusions in philosophy will be ignored. It is plain that illusion exists only in antithesis to real knowledge. This last must be assumed as something above all question. And a rough and provisional, though for our purpose sufficiently accurate, demarcation of the regions of the real and the illusory seems to coincide with the line which common sense draws between what all normal men agree in holding and what the individual holds, whether temporarily or permanently, in contradiction to this. For our present purpose the real is that which is true for all. Thus, though physical science may tell us that there is nothing corresponding to our sensations of colour in the world of matter and motion which it conceives as surrounding us; yet, inasmuch as to all men endowed with the normal colour-sense the same material objects appear to have the same colour, we may speak of any such perception as practically true, marking it off from those plainly illusory perceptions which are due to some subjective cause, as, for example, fatigue of the retina.

To sum up: in treating of illusions we shall assume, what science as distinguished from philosophy is bound to assume, namely, that human experience is consistent; that men's perceptions and beliefs fall into a consensus. From this point of view illusion is seen to arise through some exceptional feature in the situation or condition of the individual, which, for the time, breaks the chain of intellectual solidarity which under ordinary circumstances binds the single member to the collective body. Whether the common experience which men thus obtain is rightly interpreted is a question which does not concern us here. For our present purpose, which is the determination and explanation of illusion as popularly understood, it is sufficient that there is this general consensus of belief, and this may provisionally be regarded as at least practically true.

If illusion is the simulation of immediate knowledge, the most obvious mode of classifying illusions would appear to be according to the variety of the knowledge which they simulate.

Now, the popular psychology that floats about in the ordinary forms of language has long since distinguished certain kinds of unreasoned or uninferred knowledge. Of these the two best known are perception and memory. When I see an object before me, or when I recall an event in my past experience, I am supposed to grasp a piece of knowledge directly, to know something immediately, and not through the medium of something else. Yet I know differently in the two cases. In the first I know by what is called a presentative process, namely, that of sense-perception; in the second I know by a representative process, namely, that of reproduction, or on the evidence of memory. In the one case the object of cognition is present to my perceptive faculties; in the other it is recalled by the power of memory.

Scientific psychology tends, no doubt, to break down some of these popular distinctions. Just as the zoologist sometimes groups together varieties of animals which the unscientific eye would never think of connecting, so the psychologist may analyze mental operations which appear widely dissimilar to the popular mind, and reduce them to one fundamental process. Thus recent psychology draws no sharp distinction between perception and recollection. It finds in both very much the same elements, though combined in a different way. Strictly speaking, indeed, perception must be defined as a presentative-representative operation. To the psychologist it comes to very much the same thing whether, for example, on a visit to Switzerland, our minds are occupied in perceiving the distance of a mountain or in remembering some pleasant excursion which we made to it on a former visit. In both cases there is a reinstatement of the past, a reproduction of earlier experience, a process of adding to a present impression a product of imagination—taking this word in its widest sense. In both cases the same laws of reproduction or association are illustrated.

Just as a deep and exhaustive analysis of the intellectual operations thus tends to identify their various forms as they are distinguished by the popular mind, so a thorough investigation of the flaws in these operations, that is to say, the counterfeits of knowledge, will probably lead to an identification of the essential mental process which underlies them. It is apparent, for example, that, whether a man projects some figment of his imagination into the external world, giving it, present material reality, or whether (if I may be allowed the term) he retrojects it into the dim region of the past, and takes it for a reality that has been he is committing substantially the same blunder. The source of the illusion in both cases is one and the same.

It might seem to follow from this that a scientific discussion of the subject would overlook the obvious distinction between illusions of perception and those of memory; that it would attend simply to differences in the mode of origination of the illusion, whatever its external form. Our next step, then, would appear to be to determine these differences in the mode of production.

That there are differences in the origin and source of illusion is a fact which has been fully recognized by those writers who have made a special study of sense-illusions. By these the term illusion is commonly employed in a narrow, technical sense, and opposed to hallucination. An illusion, it is said, must always have its starting-point in some actual impression, whereas a hallucination has no such basis. Thus it is an illusion when a man, under the action of terror, takes a stump of a tree, whitened by the moon's rays, for a ghost. It is a hallucination when an imaginative person so vividly pictures to himself the form of some absent friend that, for the moment, he fancies himself actually beholding him. Illusion is thus a partial displacement of external fact by a fiction of the imagination, while hallucination is a total displacement.

This distinction, which has been adopted by the majority of recent alienists[1], is a valuable one, and must not be lost sight of here. It would seem, from a psychological point of view, to be an important circumstance in the genesis of a false perception whether the intellectual process sets out from within or from without. And it will be found, moreover, that this distinction may be applied to all the varieties of error which I propose to consider. Thus, for example, it will be seen further on that a false recollection may set out either from the idea of some actual past occurrence or from a present product of the imagination.

It is to be observed, however, that the line of separation between illusion and hallucination, as thus defined, is a very narrow one. In by far the largest number of hallucinations it is impossible to prove that there is no modicum of external agency co-operating in the production of the effect. It is presumable, indeed, that many, if not all, hallucinations have such a basis of fact. Thus, the madman who projects his internal thoughts outwards in the shape of external voices may, for aught we know, be prompted to do so in part by faint impressions coming from the ear, the result of those slight stimulations to which the organ is always exposed, even in profound silence, and which in his case assume an exaggerated intensity. And even if it is clearly made out that there are hallucinations in the strict sense, that is to say, false perceptions which are wholly due to internal causes, it must be conceded that illusion shades off into hallucination by steps which it is impossible for science to mark. In many cases it must be left an open question whether the error is to be classed as an illusion or as a hallucination.[2]

For these reasons, I think it best not to make the distinction between illusion and hallucination the leading principle of my classification. However important psychologically, it does not lend itself to this purpose. The distinction must be kept in view and illustrated as far as possible. Accordingly, while in general following popular usage and employing the term illusion as the generic name, I shall, when convenient, recognize the narrow and technical sense of the term as answering to a species co-ordinate with hallucination.

Departing, then, from what might seem the ideally best order of exposition, I propose, after all, to set out with the simple popular scheme of faculties already referred to. Even if they are, psychologically considered, identical operations, perception and memory are in general sufficiently marked off by a speciality in the form of the operation. Thus, while memory is the reproduction of something with a special reference of consciousness to its past existence, perception is the reproduction of something with a special reference to its present existence as a part of the presented object. In other words, though largely representative when viewed as to its origin, perception is presentative in relation to the object which is supposed to be immediately present to the mind at the moment.[3] Hence the convenience of recognizing the popular classification, and of making it our starting-point in the present case.

All knowledge which has any appearance of being directly reached, immediate, or self-evident, that is to say, of not being inferred from other knowledge, may be divided into four principal varieties: Internal Perception or Introspection of the mind's own feelings; External Perception; Memory; and Belief, in so far as it simulates the form of direct knowledge. The first is illustrated in a man's consciousness of a present feeling of pain or pleasure. The second and the third kinds have already been spoken of, and are too familiar to require illustration. It is only needful to remark here that, under perception, or rather in close conjunction with it, I purpose dealing with the knowledge of other's feelings, in so far as this assumes the aspect of immediate knowledge. The term belief is here used to include expectations and any other kinds of conviction that do not fall under one of the other heads. An instance of a seemingly immediate belief would be a prophetic prevision of a coming disaster, or a man's unreasoned persuasion as to his own powers of performing a difficult task.

It is, indeed, said by many thinkers that there are no legitimate immediate beliefs; that all our expectations and other convictions about things, in so far as they are sound, must repose on other genuinely immediate knowledge, more particularly sense-perception and memory. This difficult question need not be discussed here. It is allowed by all that there is a multitude of beliefs which we hold tenaciously and on which we are ready to act, which, to the mature mind, wear the appearance of intuitive truths, owing their cogency to nothing beyond themselves. A man's belief in his own merits, however it may have been first obtained, is as immediately assured to him as his recognition of a real object in the act of sense-perception. It may be added that many of our every-day working beliefs about the world in which