Illusions by James Sully (story reading txt) 📕

There is one other relation of our subject to philosophic problems which I have purposely left for final consideration. Our study has consisted mainly in the psychological analysis of illusions supposed to be known or capable of being known as such. Now, the modern association school professes to be able to resolve some of the so-called intuitions of common sense into elements exactly similar to those into which we have here been resolving what are acknowledged by all as illusions. This fact would seem to point to a close connection between the scientific study of illusion and the particular view of these fundamental intuitions taken by one philosophic school. In order to see whether there is really this connection, we must reflect a little further on the nature of the method which we have been pursuing.

I have already had occasion to rise the expression "scientific psychology," or psychology as a positive science, and the meaning of this expression must now be more carefully considered. As a positive science, psychology is limited to the function of analyzing mental states, and of tracing their origin in previous and more simple mental states. It has, strictly speaking, nothing to do with the question of the legitimacy or validity of any mental act.

Take a percept, for example. Psychology can trace its parentage in sensation, the mode in which it has come by its contents in the laws of association. But by common consent, a percept implies a presentative apprehension of an object now present to sense. Is this valid or illusory? This question psychology, as science, does not attempt to answer. It would not, I conceive, answer it even if it were able to make out that the whole mental content in the percept can be traced back to elementary sensations and their combinations. For the fact that in the chemistry of mind elements may combine in perfectly new forms does not disprove that the forms thus arising, whether sentiments or quasi-cognitions, are invalid. Much less can psychology dispute the validity of a percept if it cannot be sure that the mind adds nothing to sensation and its grouping; that in the genesis of the perceptive state, with its intuition of something external and now present as object, nothing like a form of intelligence is superimposed on the elements of sensation, giving to the result of their coalescence the particular unity which we find. Whether psychology as a positive science can ever be sure of this: whether, that is to say, it can answer the question, "How do we come by the idea of object?" without assuming some particular philosophic or extra-scientific theory respecting the ultimate nature of mind, is a point which I purposely leave open.

I would contend, then, that the psychologist, in tracing the genesis of the percept out of previous mental experiences, no more settles the question, What is the object of perception? than the physicist settles it in referring the sense-impression (and so the percept) to a present material agent as its condition.

The same applies to our idea of self. I may discover the concrete experiences which supply the filling in of the idea, and yet not settle the question, Does intelligence add anything in the construction of the form of this idea? and still less settle the question whether there is any real unity answering to the idea.

If this is a correct distinction, if psychology, as science, does not determine questions of validity or objective meaning but only of genesis, if it looks at mental states in relation only to their temporal and causal concomitants and not to their objects, it must follow that our preceding analysis of illusion involves no particular philosophic theory as to the nature of intelligence, but, so far as accurate, consists of scientific facts which all philosophic theories of intelligence must alike be prepared to accept. And I have little doubt that each of the two great opposed doctrines, the intuitive and the associational, would claim to be in a position to take up these facts into its particular theory, and to view them in its own way.

But in addition to this scientific psychology, there is another so-called psychology, which is, strictly speaking, philosophic. This, I need hardly say, is the association philosophy. It proceeds by analyzing certain cognitions and sentiments into their elements, and straightway declaring that they mean nothing more than these. That is to say, the associationist passes from genesis to validity, from the history of a conscious state to its objective meaning. Thus, from showing that an intuitive belief, say that in causation, is not original (in the individual or at least in the race), it goes on to assert that it is not a valid immediate cognition at all. Now, I am not concerned here to inquire into the logical value of this transition, but simply to point out that it is extra-scientific and distinctly philosophic. If logically justifiable, it is so because of some plainly philosophic assumption, as that made by Hume, namely, that all ideas not derived from impressions are to this extent fictitious or illusory.

And now we are in a position to understand the bearing of our scientific analysis of acknowledged illusions on the associationist's treatment of the alleged illusions of common sense. There is no doubt, I think, that some of the so-called intuitions of common sense have points of analogy to acknowledged illusions. For example, the conviction in the act of perception that something external to the mind and independent of it exists, has a certain superficial resemblance to an hallucination of sense; and moreover, the associationist seeks to explain it by means of these very processes which underlie what is recognized by all as sense-illusion.[158] Again, it may be said that our notions of force and of a causal nexus in the physical world imply the idea of conscious energy as known through our muscular sensations, and so have a suspicious resemblance to those anthropomorphic illusions of which I have spoken under Illusions of Insight. Once more, the consciousness of freedom may, as I have suggested, be viewed as analogous in its form and its mode of origin to illusions of introspection. As a last example, it may be said that the mind's certain conviction of the innateness of some of its ideas resembles those illusions of memory which arise through an inability to think ourselves back into a remote past having a type of consciousness widely unlike that of the present.

But now, mark the difference. In our scientific analysis of popularly known illusions, we had something by which to determine the illusory character of the presentation or belief. We had a popularly or scientifically accepted standard of certainty, by a reference to which we might test the particular soi-disant cognition. But in the case of these fundamental beliefs we have no such criterion, except we adopt some particular philosophic theory, say that of the associationist himself. Hence this similarity in structure and origin cannot in itself be said to amount to a proof of equality of logical or objective value. Here again it must be remarked that origin, does not carry validity or invalidity with it.[159]

We thus come back to our starting-point. While there are close relations, psychological and logical, between the scientific study of the ascertained facts of illusion and the philosophic determination of what is illusory in knowledge as a whole, the two domains must be clearly distinguished. On purely scientific ground we cannot answer the question, "How far does illusion extend?" The solution of this question must be handed over to the philosopher, as one aspect of his problem of cognition.

One or two remarks may, perhaps, be hazarded in concluding this account of the relation of the scientific to the philosophic problem of illusion. Science, as we have seen, takes its stand on a stable consensus, a body of commonly accepted belief. And this being so, it would seem to follow, that so far as she is allowed to interest herself in philosophic questions, she will naturally be disposed to ask, What beliefs are shared in by all minds, so far as normal and developed? In other words, she will be inclined to look at universality as the main thing to be determined in the region of philosophic inquiry. The metaphysical sceptic, fond of daring exploits, may break up as many accepted ideas as he likes into illusory débris, provided only he has some bit of reality left to take his stand on. Meanwhile, the scientific mind, here agreeing with the practical mind, will ask, "Will the beliefs thus said to be capable of being shown to be illusory ever cease to exercise their hold on men's minds, including that of the iconoclast himself? Is the mode of demonstration of such a kind as to be likely ever to materially weaken the common-sense 'intuition'?"

This question would seem to be most directly answerable by an appeal to individual testimony. Viewed in this light, it is a question for the present, for some few already allege that in their case philosophic reasonings exercise an appreciable effect on these beliefs. And so far as this is so, the man of scientific temper will feel that there is a question for him.

It is evident, however, that the question of the persistence of these fundamental beliefs is much more one for the future than for the present. The correction of a clearly detected illusion is, as I have more than once remarked, a slow process. An illusion such as the apparent movement of the sun will persist as a partially developed error long after it has been convicted. And it may be that the fundamental beliefs here referred to, even if presumably illusory, are destined to exercise their spell for long ages yet.

Whether this will be the case or not, whether these intuitive beliefs are destined slowly to decay and be dissolved as time rolls on, or whether they will retain an eternal youth, is a question which we of to-day seem, on a first view of the matter, to have no way of answering which does not assume the very point in question—the truth or falsity of the belief. This much may, however, be said. The associationist who resolves these erroneous intuitions into the play of association, admits that the forces at work generating and consolidating the illusory belief are constant and permanent forces, and such as are not likely to be less effective in the future than they have been in the past. Thus, he teaches that the intuition of the single object in the act of perception owes its strength to "inseparable association," according to which law the ideas of the separate "possibilities of sensation," which are all we know of the object, coalesce in the shape of an idea of a single uniting substance. He adds, perhaps, that heredity has tended, and will still tend, to fix the habit of thus transforming an actual multiplicity into an imaginary unity. And in thus arguing, he is allowing that the illusion is one which, to say the least of it, it will always be exceedingly difficult for reason to dislodge.

In view of this uncertainty, and of the possibility, if not the probability, of these beliefs remaining as they have remained, at least approximately universal, the man of science will probably be disposed to hold himself indifferently to the question. He will be inclined to say, "What does it matter whether you call such an apparently permanent belief the correlative of a reality or an illusion? Does it make any practical difference whether a universal 'intuition,' of which we cannot