Warren Hilton

“ This other thing, this physical table, whatever it is, can never be directly known, if indeed it has any existence, a fact that many distinguished philosophers have had the courage to deny.
Imagine, then, for a moment that everything except mind should suddenly cease to exist, but that your sense-perceptions—that [Pg 52] is to say, your perception of sensory impressions—were to continue to follow one another as before. Would not the physical world be for you just exactly what it is today, and would you not have the same reasons for believing in its existence that you now have? ”

“ Philosophers have been wrangling for some thousands of years as to whether we have any real and absolute knowledge, as to whether matter actually does or does not exist, as to the reliability or unreliability of the impressions we receive through the senses. But there is one thing that all scientific men are agreed upon, and that is that such knowledge as we do possess comes to us by way of perception through the organs of sense. ”

“ Clearly, then, the table of which you are directly and immediately conscious when your eyes are open is always this mental duplicate, this aggregate of color, form, size and touch impressions; while the real table, the physical table, may be something other than the one of which you are directly aware. ”

“ Whether you succeed or fail depends altogether upon your own attitude toward the external facts of life.
You have within you a living Force against which all the world is powerless. You have only to know it and to learn how to use it. ”

“ If the physical agencies through which your sense-impressions of the lamp-shade filter are not identical with the agencies through which they pass to the other person's brain, then your mental picture and his mental picture cannot be the same. You can never be sure that what both you and another may describe as green may not create an entirely different impression in your mind from the impression it creates in his. ”

“ If you insist that the table exists outside of your mind, you must admit that your knowledge of it is not direct, immediate and intuitive, but indirect [Pg 50] and representative, because of intervening physical agencies, and that the only thing directly known is the mental impression of the table. On the other hand, if you insist that your knowledge of the table is direct, immediate and intuitive you must admit that the table is only a mental image, a mental reality, if it is any sort of reality at all, and that it has no existence outside of the mind. ”

“ Look at this subject for a moment and you will see that the world in which you live and work is a world of your own making. All the factors of success or failure are factors of your own choosing and creation. ”

“ You will not question the statement that what you do with your life is the combined result of heredity and environment. At the same time you doubtless possess a more or less hazy belief in the freedom of your own will. ”

“ You can change the setting of your mental stage from portentous gloom to sun-lit assurance. You can concentrate your thought upon the useful, [Pg 63] the helpful and the cheerful, ignore the useless and annoying, and make your life a life of hope and joy, of promise and fulfilment. ”

“ You know that part of these nerves are sensory nerves and part of them are motor nerves. You know that the sensory nerves convey to the brain the impressions received from the outer world and that the motor nerves relay this information to the rest of the body coupled with commands for appropriate muscular action. ”

“ One aspect has to do with the inability of the sense-organs to record the facts of the outer world with perfect precision. These organs are the result of untold ages of evolution, and, generally speaking, have become wonderfully efficient, but they display surprising inaccuracies. ”

“ Every cell must exercise a form of intelligence, from the auditory cell reporting a sound-wave or the skin cell reporting an injury to the muscle cells that ultimately receive and understand a message directing them to remove the part from danger.
Reaction-time, so called, is thus occupied by cellular action in the form of mental processes intervening between the [Pg 20] nerve-ends and the brain center, in much the same way that light and sound vibrations intervene between the object perceived and the surface of the body. ”

“ You see the sun without being able to hear it because the only nerve-ends tuned to vibrate in harmony with the ether-waves set in action by the sun are nerve-ends that are connected with the brain center devoted to sight. ”

“ It is obvious that the world is not the same for all of us; but that it is for each one of us simply the world of his individual perceptions.
As Many Worlds as Minds
The whole subject of sense-impressions, [Pg 53] sensation and perception may, therefore, be looked at from the standpoint of the mind as an active influence, as well as from the standpoint of outside objects as the exciting causes of sense-impressions. ”

“ Yet at every moment of your day or night they are there in greater or less degree, titillating the unsleeping nerve-ends of the sensorium.
Selective Process that Determines Conduct
Your mind cannot take time to make all these sense-impressions the subject of conscious thought. It can trouble itself only with those that bear in some way upon your interests in life.
Your mind is like the receiving apparatus of the wireless telegraph which picks from the air those particular vibrations to which it is attuned. Your mind is selective. It is discriminating. ”

“ The ordinary man sees but one thing at a time, while the exceptional man sees many things at every glance and is prepared to remember and act upon them in emergency.
Having determined a person's scope of attention, you may want to test his accuracy in details as compared with other men. To conduct such an experiment dictate a statement which will form one typewritten letterhead sheet. ”

“ Think, then, what crisscross of air currents and confusion of ether vibrations, what myriad of physical events, must intervene between any distant object and your own body before sensations come and bring a consciousness of that object's existence!
Nor can you be sure, even after any particular [Pg 13] vibration has reached the surface of your body, that it will reach your mind unaltered and intact!
Etheric Vibrations as Causing Sensations
What goes on in the body itself is made clear by your knowledge of the cellular structure of man. ”

“ The advertiser who understands sensory illusions gives an impression of bigness to the picture of an article by the artful use of lines and contrasting figures. If his advertisement shows a picture of a building to which he wishes to [Pg 32] give the impression of bigness, he adds contrasting figures such as those of tiny men and women so that the unknown may be measured by the known. If he shows a picture of a cigar, he places the cigar vertically, because he knows that it will look longer that way than if placed horizontally. ”

“ Direct perception of an outside reality is impossible.
[Pg 12]
Second-Hand Knowledge
Before you can become aware of any object there must first arise between it and your mind a chain of countless distinct physical events.
Modern science tells us that light is due to undulations or wave-like vibrations of the ether, sound to those of the air, etc. These vibrations are transmitted from one particle of ether or air to another, and so from the thing perceived to the body of man. ”

“ It means that sense-impressions and your perception of them are two very different things. It means that sense-impressions may throng in upon you as they will. They are the work of external stimuli impressing themselves upon [Pg 58] the sensorium as upon a mechanical register. You are helpless to discriminate among them. You cannot accept some and exclude others. You are a perambulating dry plate upon which outside objects produce their images.
Prearranging Your Consciousness
But, and this is a vital distinction, perception is an act of the mind. It is initiated from within. ”

“ Aside from the obvious uses to which these sense-illusions can be put, they form the basis for a number of psychological experiments to test the abilities of persons in many ways. Here is a test which deals with the range of attention. If you desire to discover the capacity of any person to pay attention to unfamiliar questions or subjects which might at some future time have great importance, try this test. ”

“ A subtle method of conveying an idea of bigness is by placing numbers on odd-shaped cards or blocks, or on any blank white space. The object or space containing the figures always appears larger than the corresponding space without the figures.
This fact has been made the basis of a psychological experiment to determine the extent to which a subject's judgment is influenced by suggestion. To perform [Pg 33] this experiment cut bits of pasteboard into pairs of squares, circles, stars and octagons and write numbers of two figures each, say 25, 50, 34, 87, etc., upon the different pieces. ”

“ Other facts add to your uncertainty. Thus, the same stimulus acting on different organs of sense will produce different sensations. A blow upon the eye will cause you to "see stars"; a similar blow [Pg 46] upon the ear will cause you to hear an explosive sound. In other words, the vibratory effect of a touch on eye or ear is the same as that of light or sound vibrations.
Hearing the Lightning
The notion you may form of any object in the outer world depends solely upon what part of your brain happens to be connected with that particular nerve-end that receives an impression from the object. ”

“ There never has been a moment in all your life when sense-impressions were not pouring in upon you from every side, tending to disturb and annoy you and interfere with your concentration and [Pg 66] progress. ”

“ Other things being equal, the narrow type of attention belongs to a man fitted for work as a bookkeeper or mechanic, while the broad type of attention fits one for work as a foreman or superintendent or, lacking executive ability, for [Pg 38] work requiring the supervision of mechanical operations widely separated in space. ”

“ The chances are that in any previous reflections on this subject you have magnified the influence of outside agencies and wondered just how a man could make himself the master rather than the victim of circumstances. ”

“ It varies greatly with different persons. During this reaction-time, the cell or cells attacked upon the surface of the hand have conveyed news of the assault through numberless intermediate sensory nerve cells to the brain. The brain in turn has sent out its mandate through the appropriate motor nerve cells to all the muscle and other cells surrounding the injured cell, commanding them to remove it from the point of danger. ”

“ White objects appear much larger than black ones. A white square looks larger than a black one. It is said that cattle buyers who are sometimes compelled to guess at the weight of animals have learned to discount their estimate on white animals and increase it on black [Pg 31] ones to make allowances for the optical illusion. ”

“ Filled spaces look larger than empty ones because the eye unconsciously stops to look over the different parts of the filled area, and we base our estimate upon the extent of the eye movements necessary to take in the whole field. ”

“ Tell the subject to be tested to pick out the forms that are largest. The susceptible person who is not trained to discriminate closely will pick out of each pair the card that has the largest number upon it. ”

“ Then have each of the persons to be examined go through one of these sheets and cross out all the wrong letters or figures. Time this operation. The man who does it in the quickest time and overlooks the fewest errors, naturally ranks highest in speed and accuracy of work. ”