Illusions by James Sully (story reading txt) 📕

the past, we see no absolute gaps in the continuity of our conscious life; our image of this past is essentially one of an unbroken series of conscious experiences. But if through forgetfulness a part of the series is effaced from memory, how, it may be asked, is it possible to construct this perfectly continuous line? The answer is that we fill up such lacunæ vaguely by help of some very imperfectly imagined common type of conscious experience. Just as the eye sees no gap in its field of vision corresponding to the "blind spot" of the retina, but carries its impression over this area, so memory sees no lacuna in the past, but carries its image of conscious life over each of the forgotten spaces.

Sometimes this process of filling in gaps in the past becomes more complete. Thus, for example, in recalling a particular night a week or so ago, I instinctively represent it to myself as so many hours of lying in bed with the waking sensations appropriate to the circumstances, as those of bodily warmth and rest, and of the surrounding silence and darkness.

It is apparent that I cannot conceive myself apart from some mode of conscious experience. In thinking of myself in any part of the past or future in which there is actually no consciousness, or of which the conscious content is quite unknown to me, I necessarily imagine myself as consciously experiencing something. If I picture myself under any definitely conceived circumstances, I irresistibly import into my mental image the feelings appropriate to these surroundings. In this way, people tend to imagine themselves after death as lying in the grave, feeling its darkness and its chilliness. If the circumstances of the time are not distinctly represented, the conception of the conscious experience which constitutes that piece of the ego is necessarily vague, and seems generally to resolve itself into a representation of ourselves as dimly self-conscious. What this consciousness of self consists of is a point that will be taken up presently.

Illusions with respect to Personal Identity.

It would seem to follow from these errors in imaginatively filling up our past life, that our consciousness of personal identity is by no means the simple and exact process which it is commonly supposed to be. I have already remarked that the very fact of there being so large a region of the irrevocable in our past experience proves our consciousness of personal continuity to be largely a matter of inference, or of imaginative conjecture, and not simply of immediate recollection. Indeed, it may be said that our power of ignoring whole regions of the past and of leaping complacently over huge gaps in our memory and linking on conscious experience with conscious experience, involves an illusory sense of continuity, and so far of personal identity. Thus, our ordinary image of our past life, if only by omitting the very large fraction passed in sleep, in at least an approximately unconscious state, clearly contains an ingredient of illusion.[132]

It is to be added that the numerous falsifications of our past history, which our retrospective imagination is capable of perpetrating, make our representation of ourselves at different moments and in different stages of our past history to a considerable extent illusory. Thus, though to mistake a past dream-experience for a waking one may not be to lose or confuse the sense of identity, since our dreams are, after all, a part of our experience, yet to imagine that we have ourselves seen what we have only heard from another or read is clearly to confuse the boundaries of our identity. And with respect to longer sections of our history, it is plain that when we wrongly assimilate our remote to our present self, and clothe our childish nature with the feelings and the ideas of our adult life, we identify ourselves overmuch. In this way, through the corruption of our memory, a kind of sham self gets mixed up with the real self, so that we cannot, strictly speaking, be sure that when we project a mnemonic image into the remote past we are not really running away from our true personality.

So far I have been touching only on slight errors in the recognition of that identical self which is represented as persisting through all the fluctuations of conscious life. Other and grosser illusions connected with personal identity are also found to be closely related to defects or disturbances of the ordinary mnemonic process, and so can be best treated here. In order to understand these, we must inquire a little into the nature of our idea and consciousness of a persistent self. Here, again, I would remind the reader that I am treating the point only so far as it can be treated scientifically or empirically, that is to say, by examining what concrete facts or data of experience are taken up into the idea of self. I do not wish to foreclose the philosophic question whether anything more than this empirical content is involved in the conception.

My idea of myself as persisting appears to be built up of certain similarities in the succession of my experiences. Thus, my permanent self consists, on the bodily side, of a continually renewable perception of my own organism, which perception is mainly visual and tactual, and which remains pretty constant within certain limits of time. With this objective similarity is closely conjoined a subjective similarity. Thus, the same sensibilities continue to characterize the various parts of my organism. Similarly, there are the higher intellectual, emotional, and moral peculiarities and dispositions. My idea of my persistent self is essentially a collective image representing a relatively unchanging material object, endowed with unchanging sensibilities and forming a kind of support for permanent higher mental attributes.

The construction of this idea of an enduring unchanging ego is rendered very much easier by the fact that certain concrete feelings are approximately constant elements in our mental life. Among these must be ranked first that dimly discriminated mass of organic sensation which in average states of health is fairly constant, and which stands in sharp contrast to the fluctuating external sensations. These feelings enter into and profoundly colour each person's mental image of himself. In addition to this, there are the frequently recurring higher feelings, the dominant passions and ideas which approximate more or less closely to constant factors of our conscious experience.

This total image of the ego becomes defined and rendered precise by a number of distinctions, as that between my own body or that particular material object with which are intimately united all my feelings, and other material objects in general; then between my organism and other human organisms, with which I learn to connect certain feelings answering to my own, but only faintly represented instead of actually realized feelings. To these prime distinctions are added others, hardly less fundamental, as those between my individual bodily appearance and that of other living bodies, between my personal and characteristic modes of feeling and thinking and those of others, and so on.

Our sense of personal identity may be said to be rooted in that special side of the mnemonic process which consists in the linking of all sequent events together by means of a thread of common consciousness. It is closely connected with that smooth, gliding movement of imagination which appears to involve some more or less distinct consciousness of the uniting thread of similarity. And so long as this movement is possible, so long, that is to say, as retrospective imagination detects the common element, which we may specifically call the recurring consciousness of self, so long is there the undisturbed assurance of personal identity. Nay, more, even when such a recognition might seem to be difficult, if not impossible, as in linking together the very unlike selves, viewed both on their objective and subjective sides, of childhood, youth, and mature life, the mind manages, as we have seen, to feign to itself a sufficient amount of such similarity.

But this process of linking stage to stage, of discerning the common or the recurring amid the changing and the evanescent, has its limits. Every great and sudden change in our experience tends, momentarily at least, to hinder the smooth reflux of imagination. It makes too sharp a break in our conscious life, so that imagination is incapable of spanning the gap and realizing the then and the now as parts of a connected continuous tissue.[133]

These changes may be either objective or subjective. Any sudden alteration of our bodily appearance sensibly impedes the movement of imagination. A patient after a fever, when he first looks in the glass, exclaims, "I don't know myself." More commonly the bodily changes which affect the consciousness of an enduring self are such as involve considerable alterations of cœnæsthesis, or the mass of stable organic sensation. Thus, the loss of a limb, by cutting off a portion of the old sensations through which the organism may be said to be immediately felt, and by introducing new and unfamiliar feelings, will distinctly give a shock to our consciousness of self.

Purely subjective changes, too, or, to speak correctly, such as are known subjectively only, will suffice to disturb the sense of personal unity. Any great moral shock, involving something like a revolution in our recurring emotional experience, seems at the moment to rupture the bond of identity. And even some time after, as I have already remarked, such cataclysms in our mental geology lead to the imaginative thrusting of the old personality away from the new one under the form of a "dead self."[134]

We see, then, that the failure of our ordinary assurance of personal identity is due to the recognition of difference without similarity. It arises from an act of memory—for the mind must still be able to recall the past, dimly at least—but from a memory which misses its habitual support in a recognized element of constancy. If there is no memory, that is to say, if the past is a complete blank, the mind simply feels a rupture of identity without any transformation of self. This is our condition on awaking from a perfectly forgotten period of sleep, or from a perfectly unconscious state (if such is possible) when induced by anæsthetics. Such gaps are, as we have seen, easily filled up, and the sense of identity restored by a kind of retrospective "skipping." On the other hand, the confusion which arises from too great and violent a transformation of our remembered experiences is much less easily corrected. As long as the recollection of the old feelings remains, and with this the sense of violent contrast between the old and the new ones, so long will the illusion of two sundered selves tend to recur.

The full development of this process of imaginative fission or cleavage of self is to be met with in mental disease. The beginnings of such disease, accompanied as they commonly are with disturbances of bodily sensations and the recurring emotions, illustrate in a very interesting way the dependence of the recognition of self on a certain degree of uniformity in the contents of consciousness. The patient, when first aware of these changes, is perplexed, and often regards the new feelings as making up another self, a foreign Tu, as distinguished from the familiar Ego. And sometimes he expresses the relation between the old and the new self in fantastic ways, as when he imagines the former to be under the power of some foreign personality.

When the change is complete, the patient is apt to think of his former self as detached from his present, and of his previous life as a kind of unreal dream; and this fading away of