Ellipticity

“ Let us consider once more the concept of equilibrium. Inhibition of action through antagonistic impulses, or action returning upon itself, we have defined it; and the line cannot be drawn sharply between these types. The visual analogue for equilibrium may be either symmetrical figure or circle; the excursion from the centre may be either the swing of the pendulum or the sweep of the planet. The RETURN is the essential. Now it is a commonplace of criticism--though the significance of the dictum has never been sufficiently seen--that the great drama, novel, or symphony does return upon itself. ”

“ Our latent psychic possessions, among which dreams move, would seem to be by no means always at the same depth; the specific gravity of consciousness, as it were, varies, and these latent elements rise or fall, becoming nearer to the conscious surface or falling further away from it. But the greatest change must take place when the waking surface is reached and the outer world breaks on sleeping consciousness. In that change there is doubtless a process of necessary and automatic transformation and interpretation. ”

“ A mental system may be undermined or weakened by this interstitial alteration just as a building is, and yet for a time keep upright by dead habit. But a new perception, a sudden emotional shock, or an occasion which lays bare the organic alteration, will make the whole fabric fall together; and then the centre of gravity sinks into an attitude more stable, for the new ideas that reach the centre in the rearrangement seem now to be locked there, and the new structure remains permanent. ”

“ But, to be plain, though also monotonous, the uncaused cause or the effect that is only a part of the whole, or the cause or the effect that refuses to share in the other's nature, or finally the causation that is now so individual and so manifold and so effective, and that was once so single and so complete, is something that must give any thinker pause. Can a moving body move an immobile body? Can some things in the universe be mobile; others not? Can the moving body and the moved body belong to different moments of time? Can motion lead to rest or rest to motion? ”

“ But that all that we call "being" is motion: and that all motion is the expression, not of equilibrium, but of equilibrating, or of equilibrium unattained: that life-motions are expressions of equilibrium unattained: that all thought relates to the unattained: that to have what is called being in our quasi-state, is not to be in the positive sense, or is to be intermediate to Equilibrium and Inequilibrium. ”

“ Something tells us that all this is provisional; that the weakened reasons will wax strong again, and the stronger weaken; that equilibrium is unreached; that testing our reasons, not obeying them, is still the order of the day, and that we must wait awhile, patient or impatiently, until our mind is made up 'for good and all.' This inclining, first to one then to another future, both of which we represent as possible, resembles the oscillations to and fro of a material body within the limits of its elasticity. ”

“ It is not always easy to explain the acceleration of certain sentiments under the influence of a constant exciting cause. Perhaps, however, one may say that if the laws of psychology are comparable to those of mechanics, a cause of invariable dimensions acting in a continuous fashion will rapidly increase the intensity of a sentiment. We know, for example, that a force which is constant in dimension and direction, such as gravity acting upon a mass, will cause an accelerated movement. ”

“ What, then, is the essence and source of matter, force, motion, and of their distribution? A mystery which baffles human knowledge! How does the qualitative complexity of sensation and consciousness issue from this world of purely homogeneous magnitudes? ”

“ The illusion to which it is liable is not that of habitually taking duck-ponds for lilied pools, but of being more or less transiently and in varying degrees so absorbed in ideal vision as to lose the consciousness of surrounding objects or occurrences; and when that rapt condition is past, the sane genius discriminates clearly between what has been given in this parenthetic state of excitement, and what he has known, and may count on, in the ordinary world of experience. ”

“ Hence in the Eleatic philosophy there are two worlds brought face to face, lying side by side of each other, unreconciled--the world of Being, which is the true world, and the world of facts, which is illusion. Although the Eleatics deny the sense-world, and call it illusion, yet of this illusion they cannot rid themselves. In some sense or other, this world is here, is present. ”

“ All existence or all effect is produced in equilibrium, that is, by one force acting and another suffering itself to be acted upon, or when one force by acting flows in, the other receives and harmoniously submits. ”

“ Either complete equilibrium must in itself be an impossibility, or the changes of energy introduce themselves in the circular process before that equilibrium which is in itself possible has appeared.—But it would be madness to ascribe a feeling of self-preservation to existence! ”

“ But that force of outward symbols by which our active life is knit together so as to make an inexorable external identity for us, not to be shaken by our wavering consciousness, gave a strange effect to this simple movement towards taking off her ring—a movement which was but a small sequence of her energetic resolution. ”

“ In the physical world we may, by care, happen to put an ellipsoid in a state of equilibrium on the extremity of its greater axis, or a cone on its apex; these are also unstable equilibria, but the least cause intervening, the smallest movement, and the balance is instantly destroyed. ”

“ In the Eleatics the affirmation of Being took the form of a rigid immutable Ὄν, whose uncompromising unity reduced all motion, change and plurality to an inexplicable illusion, and remorselessly crushed out the whole significance of human life. ”

“ 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. ”

“ An inquiry into the cause of what is called gravitation or attraction, in which the motions of the heavenly bodies, and the preservation and operations of all nature, are deduced from an universal principle of efflux and reflux. ”

“ But the experiences of clairvoyance that have accumulated on the hands of those who have studied it in connection with mesmerism, do no more than prove the existence in human nature of a capacity for cognizing physical phenomena distant either in space or time, in some way which has nothing to do with the physical senses. ”

“ This is illustrated in what I have called Active Illusions, whether the excited perceptions and the hallucinations of sense, or the fanciful projections of memory or of expectation. Here we have a force directly opposed to that of experience. Active illusion arises, not through the imperfections of the intellectual mechanism, but through a palpable interference with this mechanism. It is a regrouping of elements which simulates the form of a suggestion by experience, but is, in reality, the outcome of the individual mind's extra-intellectual impulses. ”

“ And so when the sense of our own movement becomes indistinct, as in a railway carriage, we naturally drift into the illusion that objects, such as trees, telegraph posts, and so on, are moving, when they are perfectly still. ”

“ As, however, we have no experience with oscillating trees, we unconsciously infer the oscillations to be and feel them in our own persons. In another application of the same illusion we seem to be let down into the bowels of the earth ”

“ Let us consider the problem of illusions. For instance, we experience an aggregate of visual impressions which we unhesitatingly ascribe to the presence of a table situated “there in the room.” Yet all we have any right to be positive about is that certain visual impressions have been experienced; our belief in the existence of the table situated “there” results from an inference, a judgment formulated in an attempt to ascribe a cause to our visual sensations. ”

“ We establish the nature of the spontaneous 105consciousness at each of these centers; we determine the polarity and the direction of the polarized flow. And from this we know the motion and individual manifestation of the psyche itself; we also know the motion and rhythm of the great organs of the body. For at every point psyche and functions are so nearly identified that only by holding our breath can we realize their duality in identification—a polarized duality once more. ”

“ Another striking example is that of our sense of the temperature of objects, which is known to be strictly relative to a previous sensation, or more correctly to the momentary condition of the organ. Yet, though every intelligent person knows this, the deeply rooted habit of making sensation the measure of objective quality asserts its sway, and frequently leads us into illusion. The well-known experiment of first plunging one hand in cold water, the other in hot, and then dipping them both in tepid, is a startling example of this organized tendency. ”

“ Now that the self-existence of energy has been substantiated, and motion is no longer considered merely a condition or state of matter in the old sense, the creation and annihilation theory is being shifted to consciousness or the ego feeling. This feeling is looked upon as a product of a certain mode of motion brought about by a certain form of matter, or it is said to be one side of energy. ”

“ The hand that built can topple it down much faster. Better than the hand, and nimbler, was the invisible thought which wrought through it; and thus ever, behind the coarse effect, is a fine cause, which, being narrowly seen, is itself the effect of a finer cause. Every thing looks permanent until its secret is known. ”

“ For instance, it is a contradiction to depict one body as constantly falling towards another, and as, at the same time, constantly flying away from it. The ellipse is a form of motion which, while allowing this contradiction to go on, at the same time reconciles it. ”

“ Merely to maintain an attitude and gait which I notice in certain club men, and especially an inflation of the chest accompanying very small remarks, there goes, I am convinced, an expenditure of psychical energy little appreciated by the multitude—a mental vision of Self and deeply impressed beholders which is quite without antitype in what we call the effect produced by that hidden process. ”

“ Thus, according to the calculations, the world is an ellipsoid with three unequal axes. This supposition can be made to harmonize with the hypothesis of the primitive fluidity of the earth, the form in question being one of those assumed by free liquids in rotation. ”

“ We have arrived at the point at which it will be plain that the condition produced in these cases, and known under a varied jargon invented either to conceal ignorance, to express hypotheses, or to mask the design of impressing the imagination and possibly prey upon the pockets of a credulous and wonder-loving public—such names as mesmeric condition, magnetic sleep, clairvoyance, electro-biology, animal magnetism, faith trance, and many other aliases—such a condition, I say, is always subjective. ”

“ This agitation, this incessant and universal motion, has been a favourite subject of poetic contemplation. Heraclitus writes: "There is a perpetual flow, all is one universal current; nothing remains as it was, change alone is eternal." ”

“ It is plain, indeed, that this is the position we have been, taking up throughout our discussion of illusion. We have assumed that what is common and normal is true, or answers to what is objectively real. Thus, in dealing with errors of perception, we took for granted that the common percept—meaning by this what is permanent in the individual and the general experience—is at the same time the true percept. ”

“ Similar uncertainties arise with respect to the relative movement of two objects, the eye being supposed to be fixed in space. When two objects seem to pass one another, it may be that they are both moving in contrary directions, or that one only is moving, or finally, that both are moving in the same direction, the one faster than the other. Experience and habit here again suggest the interpretation which is most easy, and not unfrequently produce illusion. ”

“ Thus, whether we are dealing with sensations that fall below the ordinary limits of our mental experience, or with those which arise in some exceptional state of the organism, we carry the habits formed in the much wider region of average every-day perception with us. In a word, illusion in these cases always arises through what may, figuratively at least, be described as the application of a rule, valid for the majority of cases, to an exceptional case. ”

“ I happen to remember the passage: “How this metamorphosis takes place; how a force existing, as motion, heat, or light, can become a mode of consciousness; how it is possible for aerial vibrations to generate the sensation we call sound; or for the forces liberated by chemical changes in the brain to give rise to emotion,—these are mysteries which it is impossible to fathom.”
Lord Fondleton [aside to Mrs Gloring] . What a jolly easy way of getting out of a difficulty!
Drygull. ”

“ Some outward or inward shock, some drastic swing of the psychic pendulum, must sooner or later restore the balance and bring the will back to that wavering and indecisive state—poised like the point of a compass between the two extremes—which seems to be its normal attitude. ”