James Sully

“ A person's name, a striking saying, and even an event itself, when we first come across it or experience it, may for a moment seem familiar to us, and to recall some past like impression, if it only happens to resemble something in the works of a favourite novelist. And so, too, any recital of another's experience, whether oral or literary, if it deeply interests us and awakens a specially vivid imagination of the events described, may easily become the starting-point of an illusory recollection. ”

“ When dreaming, we are still sane, and shall soon prove our sanity. After all, the dream of the sleeper is corrected, if not so rapidly as the illusion of the healthy waker. As soon as the familiar stimuli of light and sound set the peripheral sense-organs in activity, and call back the nervous system to its complete round of healthy action, the illusion disappears, and we smile at our alarms and agonies, saying, "Behold, it was a dream!" ”

“ If we turn from the region of physical to that of moral ideas, we see this historical collision between common and individual conviction in a yet more impressive form. The teacher of a new moral truth has again and again been set down to be an illusionist by a society which was itself under the sway of a long-reigning error. As George Eliot observes, "What we call illusions are often, in truth, a wider vision of past and present realities—a willing movement of a man's soul with the larger sweep of the world's forces." ”

“ Youth is the period of novel effects, when all the world is fresh, and new and striking impressions crowd in thickly on the mind. Consequently, it takes much less to produce a given amount of mental excitation in childhood than in after-life. In looking back on this part of our history, we recall for the most part just those events and scenes which deeply stirred our minds by their strangeness, novelty, etc., and so impressed themselves on the tablet of our memory; and it is this sense of something out of the ordinary beat that gives the characteristic colour to our recollection. ”

“ 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. ”

“ In other words, we remember something as wonderful, admirable, exceptionally delightful, and so on, rather than as a definitely imagined event. This being so, we unconsciously transform the past occurrence by reasoning from our present standard of what is impressive. Who has not felt an unpleasant disenchantment on revisiting some church, house, or park that seemed a wondrous paradise to his young eyes? All our feelings are capable of leading us into this kind of illusion. ”

“ To say that in sleep the mind is given over to its own imaginings, is to say that the mental life in these circumstances will reflect the individual temperament and mental history. For the play of imagination at any time follows the lines of our past experience more closely than would at first appear, and being coloured with emotion, will reflect the predominant emotional impulses of the individual mind. Hence the saying of Heraclitus, that, while in waking we all have a common world, in sleep we have each a world of our own. ”

“ From widely remote parts of the organism there come impressions which excite each its peculiar visual or other image according as its local origin or its emotional tone is the more distinctly present to consciousness. Now it is a subjective ocular sensation suggesting a bouquet of lovely flowers, and close on its heels comes an impression from the organs of digestion suggesting all manner of obstacles, and so our dream-fancy plunges from a vision of flowers to one of dreadful demons. ”

“ Many of our anticipations, when first formed, involve much more than a reproduction of a past experience, namely, a complex act of constructive imagination. Our representations of these untried experiences, as, for example, those connected with a new set of circumstances, a new social condition, a new mode of occupation, and so on, are clearly at the first far from simple processes of inference from the past. They are put together by the aid of many fragmentary images, restored by distinct threads of association, yet by a process so rapid as to appear like an intuition. ”

“ Thus, I have often caught myself for a moment under the sway of the illusion that I actually visited the Exhibition of 1851, the reason being that I am able to recall the descriptions given to me of it by my friends, and the excitement attending their journey to London on the occasion. It is to be added that repetition of the act of imagination will tend still further to deepen the subsequent feeling that we are recollecting something. As Hartley well observes, a man, by repeating a story, easily comes to suppose that he remembers it. ”

“ Memory is a kind of resurrection of the buried past: as we fix our retrospective glance on it, it appears to start anew into life; forms arise within our minds which, we feel sure, must faithfully represent the things that were. We do not ask for any proof of the fidelity of this dramatic representation of our past history by memory. It is seen to be a faithful imitation, just because it is felt to be a revival of the past. ”

“ There are, I conceive, good reasons for saying that any kind of vivid imagination tends to pass into a semblance of an expectation of a coming personal experience, or an event that is about to happen within the sphere of our own observation. It has long been recognized by writers, among whom I may mention Dugald Stewart, that to distinctly imagine an event or object is to feel for the moment a degree of belief in the corresponding reality. Now, I have already said that expectation is probably a more natural and an earlier developed state of mind than memory. ”

“ Enough has probably been said to show how immensely improbable it is that our permanent cognition of so complex an object as a particular human being should be at all an accurate representation of the reality, how much of the erroneous is certain to get mixed up with the true. And this being so, we may say that our apparently simple direct cognition of a given person, our assurance of what he is and will continue to be, is to some extent illusory. ”

“ Just as when distant objects are seen mistily our imaginations come into play, leading us to fancy that we see something completely and distinctly, so when the images of memory become dim, our present imagination helps to restore them, putting a new patch into the old garment. If only there is some relic of the past event preserved, a bare suggestion of the way in which it may have happened will often suffice to produce the conviction that it actually did happen in this way. ”

“ Even when there is no approach to an illusion of perception, or to one of memory in the strict sense, the reading of a work of fiction begets at the moment a retrospective belief that has a certain resemblance to a recollection. ”

“ How inexpressibly strange does the late night-dream seem to a person on waking! He feels he has been seeing and hearing things no less real than those of waking life; but things which belong to an unfamiliar world, an order of sights and a sequence of events quite unlike those of waking experience ”

“ Thus, for example, the common construction by the dream-fancy of the experience of flight in mid-air, and the creation of those weird forms which the terror of a nightmare is wont to bring in its train, seem to point to the past action of waking fancy. To imagine one's self flying when looking at a bird is probably a common action with all persons, at least in their earlier years, and images of preternaturally horrible beings are apt to be supplied to most of us some time during life by nurses or by books. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Time, it has been often said, is known only so far as filled with concrete contents or conscious experiences, and a perfect imagination of any particular period of past time would involve a retracing of all the successive experiences which have gone to make up this section of our life. This, I need not say, never happens, both because, on the one hand, memory does not allow of a complete reproduction of any segment of our experience, and because, on the other hand, such an imaginative reproduction, even if possible, would clearly occupy as much time as the experience itself. ”

“ Our memories restore us only fragments of our past life. And just as objects seen imperfectly at a great distance may assume a shape quite unlike their real one, so an inadequate representation of a past event by memory often amounts to misrepresentation. When revisiting a place that we have not seen for many years, we are apt to find that our recollection of it consisted only of some insignificant details, which arranged themselves in our minds into something oddly unlike the actual scene. ”

“ And now we are in a position, perhaps, to define an illusion of insight, and to inquire whether there is anything answering to our definition. An illusory insight is a quasi-intuition of another's feelings which does not answer to the internal reality as presentatively known to the subject himself. In spite of the errors of introspection dealt with in the last chapter, nobody will doubt that, when it is a question between a man's knowing what is at the moment in his own mind and somebody else's knowing, logic, as well as politeness, requires us to give precedence to the former. ”

“ 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. ”

“ On the other hand, in more healthy states of mind there presents itself an exactly opposite tendency, namely, an impulse of the will to banish whatever when recalled gives pain to the furthest conceivable regions of the past. Thus, when we have lost something we cherished dearly, and the recollection of it brings fruitless longing, we instinctively seek to expel the recollection from our minds. The very feeling that what has been can never again be, seems to induce this idea of a vast remoteness of the vanished reality. ”

“ In a similar way, it has been suggested by Schopenhauer that the illusion of the lover owes its force and historical persistence to its paramount utility for the preservation of the species. And to pass from a recurring individual to a permanently common belief, it is maintained by the same pessimist and his followers that what they regard as the illusion of optimism, namely, the idea that human life as a whole is good, grows out of the individual's irrational love of life, which is only the same instinctive impulse of self-preservation appearing as conscious desire. ”

“ 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. ”

“ If, as I have said, all recognition takes place by overlooking points of diversity, the mind must, in course of time, acquire a habit of not attending to the exact quality of sense-impressions in all cases where the interpretation seems plain and obvious. Or, to use Helmholtz's words, our sensations are, in a general way, of interest to us only as signs of things, and if we are sure of the thing, we readily overlook the precise nature of the impression. ”

“ This being so, it is easy for imagination to call up a semblance of these higher feelings. Since they depend largely on representation, a mere act of representation may suffice to excite a degree of the feeling hardly distinguishable from the actual one. Thus, to imagine myself as contented is really to see myself at the moment as actually contented. Again, the actor, though, as we shall see by-and-by, he does not feel all that the spectator is apt to attribute to him, tends, when vividly representing to himself a particular shade of feeling, to regard himself as actually feeling in this way. ”

“ Owing to this cause, an illusion of memory is apt to multiply itself, one man's assertion of what happened producing by contagion a counterfeit of memory's record in other minds.
I said just now that we tend to project our present modes of experience into the past. We paint our past in the hues of the present. Thus we imagine that things which impressed us in some remote period of life must answer to what is impressive in our present stage of mental development. For example, a person recalls a hill near the home of his childhood, and has the conviction that it was of great height. ”