Illusions by James Sully (story reading txt) 📕

In order to complete this slight analysis of perception, we must look for a moment at its physical side, that is to say, at the nervous actions which are known or supposed with some degree of probability to accompany it.

The production of the sensation is known to depend on a certain external process, namely, the action of some stimulus, as light, on the sense-organ, which stimulus has its point of departure in the object, such as it is conceived by physical science. The sensation arises when the nervous process is transmitted through the nerves to the conscious centre, often spoken of as the sensorium, the exact seat of which is still a matter of some debate.

The intensification of the sensation by the reaction of attention is supposed to depend on some reinforcement of the nervous excitation in the sensory centre proceeding from the motor regions, which are hypothetically regarded as the centre of attention.[11] The classification of the impression, again, is pretty certainly correlated with the physical fact that the central excitation calls into activity elements which have already been excited in the same way.

The nervous counterpart of the final stage of perception, the synthesis of the sensation and the mental representation, is not clearly ascertained. A sensation clearly resembles a mental image in quality. It is most obviously marked off from the image by its greater vividness or intensity. Agreeably to this view, it is now held by a number of eminent physiologists and psychologists that the nervous process underlying a sensation occupies the same central region as that which underlies the corresponding image. According to this theory, the two processes differ in their degree of energy only, this difference being connected with the fact that the former involves, while the latter does not involve, the peripheral region of the nervous system. Accepting this view as on the whole well founded, I shall speak of an ideational, or rather an imaginational; and a sensational nervous process, and not of an ideational and a sensational centre.[12]

The special force that belongs to the representative element in a percept, as compared with that of a pure "perceptional" image,[13] is probably connected with the fact that, in the case of actual perception, the nervous process underlying the act of imaginative construction is organically united to the initial sensational process, of which indeed it may be regarded as a continuation.

For the physical counterpart of the two stages in the interpretative part of perception, distinguished as the passive stage of preperception, and the active stage of perception proper, we may, in the absence of certain knowledge, fall back on the hypothesis put forward by Dr. J. Hughlings Jackson, in the articles in Brain already referred to, namely, that the former answers to an action of the right hemisphere of the brain, the latter to a subsequent action of the left hemisphere. The expediting of the process of preperception in those cases where it has frequently been performed before, is clearly an illustration of the organic law that every function is improved by exercise. And the temporary disposition to perform the process due to recent imaginative activity, is explained at once on the physical side by the supposition that an actual perception and a perceptional image involve the activity of the same nervous tracts. For, assuming this to be the case, it follows, from a well-known organic law, that a recent excitation would leave a temporary disposition in these particular structures to resume that particular mode of activity.

What has here been said about visual perception will apply, mutatis mutandis, to other kinds. Although the eye is the organ of perception par excellence, our other senses are also avenues by which we intuit and recognize objects. Thus touch, especially when it is finely developed as it is in the blind, gives an immediate knowledge of objects—a more immediate knowledge, indeed, of their fundamental properties than sight. What makes the eye so vastly superior to the organ of touch as an instrument of perception, is first of all the range of its action, taking in simultaneously a large number of impressions from objects at a distance as well as near; and secondly, though this may seem paradoxical, the fact that it gives us so much indirectly, that is, by way of association and suggestion. This is the interesting side of visual perception, that, owing to the vast complex of distinguishable sensations of light and colour of various qualities and intensities, together with the muscular sensations attending the varying positions of the organ, the eye is able to recognize at any instant a whole external world with its fundamental properties and relations. The ear comes next to the eye in this respect, but only after a long interval, since its sensations (even in the case of musical combinations) do not simultaneously order themselves in an indefinitely large group of distinguishable elements, and since even the comparatively few sensations which it is capable of simultaneously receiving, being altogether passive—that is to say, having no muscular accompaniments—impart but little and vague information respecting the external order. It is plain, then, that in the study of illusion, where the indirectly known elements are the thing to be considered, the eye, and after this the ear, will mostly engage our attention.[14]

So much it seemed needful to say about the mechanism of perception, in order to understand the slight disturbances of this mechanism that manifest themselves in sense-illusion. It may be added that our study of these illusions will help still further to elucidate the exact nature of perception. Normal mental life, as a whole, at once illustrates, and is illustrated by, abnormal. And while we need a rough provisional theory of accurate perception in order to explain illusory perception at all, the investigation of this latter cannot fail to verify and even render more complete the theory which it thus temporarily adopts.

Illusions of Perception.

With this brief psychological analysis of perception to help us, let us now pass to the consideration of the errors incident to the process, with a view to classify them according to their psychological nature and origin.

And here there naturally arises the question, How shall we define an illusion of perception? When trying to fix the definition of illusion in general, I practically disposed of this question. Nevertheless, as the point appears to me to be of some importance, I shall reproduce and expand one or two of the considerations then brought forward.

It is said by certain, philosophers that perception, as a whole, is an illusion, inasmuch as it involves the fiction of a real thing independent of mind, yet somehow present to it in the act of sense-perception. But this is a question for philosophy, not for science. Science, including psychology, assumes that in perception there is something real, without inquiring what it may consist of, or what its meaning may be. And though in the foregoing analysis of perception, viewed as a complex mental phenomenon or psychical process, I have argued that a percept gets its concrete filling up out of elements of conscious experience or sensations, I have been careful not to contend that the particular elements of feeling thus represented are the object of perception or the thing perceived. It may be that what we mean by a single object with its assemblage of qualities is much more than any number of such sensations; and it must be confessed that, on the face of it, it seems to be much more. And however this be, the question, What is meant by object; and is the common persuasion of the existence of such an entity in the act of perception accurate or illusory? must be handed over to philosophy.

While in the following examination of sense-illusions we put out of sight what certain philosophers say about the illusoriness of perception as a whole, we shall also do well to leave out of account what physical science is sometimes supposed to tell us respecting a constant element of illusion in perception. The physicist, by reducing all external changes to "modes of motion," appears to leave no room in his world-mechanism for the secondary qualities of bodies, such as light and heat, as popularly conceived. Yet, while allowing this, I think we may still regard the attribution of qualities like colour to objects as in the main correct and answering to a real fact. When a person says an object is red, he is understood by everybody as affirming something which is true or false, something therefore which either involves an external fact or is illusory. It would involve an external fact whenever the particular sensation which he receives is the result of a physical action (other vibrations of a certain order), which would produce a like sensation in anybody else in the same situation and endowed with the normal retinal sensibility. On the other hand, an illusory attribution of colour would imply that there is no corresponding physical agency at work in the case, but that the sensation is connected with exceptional individual conditions, as, for example, altered retinal sensibility.

We are now, perhaps, in a position to frame a rough definition of an illusion of perception as popularly understood. A large number of such phenomena may be described as consisting in the formation of percepts or quasi-percepts in the minds of individuals under external circumstances which would not give rise to similar percepts in the case of other people.

A little consideration, however, will show that this is not an adequate definition of what is ordinarily understood by an illusion of sense. There are special circumstances which are fitted to excite a momentary illusion in all minds. The optical illusions due to the reflection and refraction of light are not peculiar to the individual, but arise in all minds under precisely similar external conditions.

It is plain that the illusoriness of a perception is in these cases determined in relation to the sense-impressions of other moments and situations, or to what are presumably better percepts than the present one. Sometimes this involves an appeal from one sense to another. Thus, there is the process of verification of sight by touch, for example, in the case of optical images, a mode of perception which, as we have seen, gives a more direct cognition of external quality. Conversely, there may occasionally be a reference from touch to sight, when it is a question of discriminating two points lying very close to one another. Finally, the same sense may correct itself, as when the illusion of the stereoscope is corrected by afterwards looking at the two separate pictures.

We may thus roughly define an illusion of perception as consisting in the formation of a quasi-percept which is peculiar to an individual, or which is contradicted by another and presumably more accurate percept. Or, if we take the meaning of the word common to include both the universal as contrasted with the individual experience, and the permanent, constant, or average, as distinguished from the momentary and variable percept, we may still briefly describe an illusion of perception as a deviation from the common or collective experience.

Sources of Sense-Illusion.

Understanding sense-illusion in this way, let us glance back at