Illusions by James Sully (story reading txt) 📕

This habit may, however, beget palpable illusion in another way. In certain exceptional cases the coalescence does not take place, as when I look at a distant object and hold a pencil just before my eyes.[23] And in this case the organized tendency to take one visual impression for one object asserts its force, and I tend to fall into the illusion of seeing two separate pencils. If I do not wholly lapse into the error, it is because my experience has made me vaguely aware that double images under these circumstances answer to one object, and that if there were really two pencils present I should have four visual impressions.

Once more, it is a law of sensory stimulation that an impression persists for an appreciable time after the cessation of the action of the stimulus. This "after sensation" will clearly lead to illusion, in so far as we tend to think of the stimulus as still at work. It forms, indeed, as will be seen by-and-by, the simplest and lowest stage of hallucination. Sometimes this becomes the first stage of a palpable error. After listening to a child crying for some time the ear easily deceives itself into supposing that the noise is continued when it has actually ceased. Again, after taking a bandage from a finger, the tingling and other sensations due to the pressure sometimes persist for a good time, in which case they easily give rise to an illusion that the finger is still bound.

It follows from this fact of the reverberation of the nervous structures after the removal of a stimulus, that whenever two discontinuous stimulations follow one another rapidly enough, they will appear continuous. This fact is a fruitful source of optical illusion. The appearance of a blending of the stripes of colours on a rotating disc or top, of the formation of a ring of light by swinging round a piece of burning wood, and the illusion of the toy known as the thaumatrope, or wheel of life, all depend on this persistence of retinal impression. Many of the startling effects of sleight of hand are undoubtedly due in part to this principle. If two successive actions or sets of circumstances to which the attention of the spectator is specially directed follow one another by a very narrow interval of time, they easily appear continuous, so that there seems absolutely no time for the introduction of an intermediate step.[24]

There is another limit to sensibility which is in a manner the opposite to the one just named. It is a law of nervous stimulation that a continued activity of any structure results in less and less psychic result, and that when a stimulus is always at work it ceases in time to have any appreciable effect. The common illustration of this law is drawn from the region of sound. A constant noise, as of a mill, ceases to produce any conscious sensation. This fact, it is plain, may easily become the commencement of an illusion. Not only may we mistake a measure of noise for perfect silence,[25] we may misconceive the real nature of external circumstances by overlooking some continuous impression.

Curious illustrations of this effect are found in optical illusions, namely, the errors we make respecting the movement of stationary objects after continued movement of the eyes. When, for example, in a railway carriage we have for some time been following the (apparent) movement of objects, as trees, etc., and turn our eyes to an apparently stationary object, as the carpet of the compartment, this seems to move in the contrary direction to that of the trees. Helmholtz's explanation of this illusion is that when we suppose that we are fixing our eye on the carpet we are really continuing to move it over the surface by reason of the organic tendency, already spoken of, to go on doing anything that has been done. But since we are unaware of this prolonged series of ocular movements, the muscular feelings having become faint, we take the impression produced by the sliding of the picture over the retina to be the result of a movement of the object.[26]

Another limit to our sensibility, which needs to be just touched on here, is known by the name of the specific energy of the nerves. One and the same nerve-fibre always reacts in a precisely similar way, whatever the nature of the stimulus. Thus, when the optic nerve is stimulated in any manner, whether by light, mechanical pressure, or an electric current, the same effect, a sensation of light, follows.[27] In a usual way, a given class of nerve-fibre is only stimulated by one kind of stimulus. Thus, the retina, in ordinary circumstances, is stimulated by light. Owing to this fact, there has arisen a deeply organized habit of translating the impression in one particular way. Thus, I instinctively regard a sensation received by means of the optic nerve as one caused by light.

Accordingly, whenever circumstances arise in which a like sensation is produced by another kind of stimulus, we fall into illusion. The phosphenes, or circles of light which are seen when the hinder part of the eyeball is pressed, may be said to be illusory in so far as we speak of them as perceptions of light, thus referring them to the external physical agency which usually causes them. The same remark applies to those "subjective sensations," as they are called, which are known to have as their physical cause subjective stimuli, consisting, in the case of sight, in varying conditions of the peripheral organ, as increased blood-pressure. Strictly speaking, such simple feelings as these appear to be, involve an ingredient of false perception: in saying that we perceive light at all, we go beyond the pure sensation, interpreting this wrongly.

Very closely connected with this limitation of our sensibility is another which refers to the consciousness of the local seat, or origin of the impression. This has so far its basis in the sensation itself as it is well known that (within the limits of local discrimination, referred to above) sensations have a particular "local" colour, which varies in the case of each of the nervous fibres by the stimulation of which they arise.[28] But though this much is known through a difference in the sensibility, nothing more is known. Nothing can certainly be ascertained by a mere inspection of the sensation as to the distance the nervous process has travelled, whether from the peripheral termination of the fibre or from some intermediate point.

In a general way, we refer our sensations to the peripheral endings of the nerves concerned, according to what physiologists have called "the law of eccentricity." Thus I am said to feel the pain caused by a bruise in the foot in the member itself. This applies also to some of the sensations of the special senses. Thus, impressions of taste are clearly localized in the corresponding peripheral terminations.

With respect to the sense of smell, and still more to those of hearing and sight, where the impression is usually caused by an object at a distance from the peripheral organ, our attention to this external cause leads us to overlook in part the "bodily seat" of the sensation. Yet even here we are dimly aware that the sensation is received by way of a particular part of the sensitive surface, that is to say, by a particular sense-organ. Thus, though referring an odour to a distant flower, we perceive that the sensation of odour has its bodily origin in the nose. And even in the case of hearing and sight, we vaguely refer the impressions, as such, to the appropriate sense-organ. There is, indeed, in these cases a double local reference, a faint one to the peripheral organ which is acted on, and a more distinct one to the object or the force in the environment which acts on this.

Now, it may be said that the act of localization is in itself distinctly illusory, since it is known that the sensation first arises in connection with the excitation of the sensory centre, and not of the peripheral fibre.[29]

Yet it must at least be allowed that this localization of sensation answers to the important fact that, under usual circumstances, the agency producing the sensation is applied at this particular point of the organism, the knowledge of which point is supposed by modern psychologists to have been very slowly learnt by the individual and the race, through countless experiments with the moving organ of touch, assisted by the eye.

Similarly, the reference of the impression, in the case of hearing and sight, to an object in the environment, though, as we have seen, from one point of view illusory, clearly answers to a fact of our habitual experience; for in an immense preponderance of cases at least a visual or auditory impression does arise through the action on the sense-organ of a force (ether or air waves) proceeding from a distant object.

In some circumstances, however, even this element of practical truth disappears, and the localization of the impression, both within and without the organism, becomes altogether illusory. This result is involved in the illusions, already spoken of, which arise from the instinctive tendency to refer sensations to the ordinary kind of stimulus. Thus, when a feeling resulting from a disturbance in the optic nerve is interpreted as one of external light vaguely felt to be acting on the eye, or one resulting from some action set up in the auditory fibre as a sensation of external sound vaguely felt to be entering the ear, we see that the error of localization is a consequence of the other error already characterized.

As I have already observed, an excitation of a nerve at any other point than the peripheral termination, occurs but rarely in normal life. One familiar instance is the stimulation of the nerve running to the hand and fingers, by a sharp blow on the elbow over which it passes. As everybody knows, this gives rise to a sense of pain at the extremities of the nerve. The most common illustration of such errors of localization is found in subjective sensations, such as the impression we sometimes have of something creeping over the skin, of a disagreeable taste in the mouth, of luminous spots floating across the field of vision, and so on. The exact physiological seat of these is often a matter of conjecture only; yet it may safely be said that in many instances the nervous excitation originates at some point considerably short of its peripheral extremity: in which case there occurs the illusion of referring the impressions to the peripheral sense-organ, and to an external force acting on this.

The most striking instances of these errors of localization are found in abnormal circumstances. It is well known that a man who has lost a leg refers all sensations arising from a stimulation of the truncated fibres to his lost foot, and in some cases has even to convince himself of the non-existence of his lost member by sight or touch. Patients often describe these experiences in very odd language. "If," says one of Dr. Weir Mitchell's patients, "I should say I am more sure of the leg which ain't than the one which air, I guess I should be about correct."[30]

There is good reason for supposing that this