Inanimate object

“ Sometimes I have thought—but no doubt fancifully—that so-called inanimate objects are not as inanimate as one might think, but are possessed of a character like other people, only one of an unadulterated pettiness and perversity rarely found in the human. ”

“ Thus, the momentary occurrence of partial illusion in intense sympathy with others, including that imaginative projection of self into inanimate objects, to which reference has already been made, may be said to depend on exclusive attention to the subjective aspect of self, to the total disregard of the objective aspect. ”

“ They do not take the further step of seeing that there is animation in the so-called inanimate. Sense and volition are not habitually attributed by them to inanimate objects. Much less do they assume, as we are sometimes told, the presence in them of a conscious agent not visible to the senses. ”

“ This interpretation of all movements and all facial characteristics in the sense of intentions, man has even brought to bear on things inanimate,—urged on as he was by the illusion that there was nothing inanimate. ”

“ It is certain that the inanimate objects by which you are surrounded have a direct action on the brain. ”

“ The immense gulf, popularly made between the animate and the inanimate, thus turns out to be an unfounded illusion; and the whole universe reveals itself as an unfathomable series, or congeries, of living personalities, united by the presence of the omnipresent ether which fills universal space. ”

“ Concerning the Inanimate Matter, which of it self is a dead, dull, and idle matter, your Author denies it to be a co-agent or assistant to the animate matter: For, says he, how can dead and idle things act? ”

“ We thus arrive at the extremely important conviction that all natural bodies which are known to us are equally animated, that the distinction which has been made between animate and inanimate bodies does not exist. ”

“ It has been held that mind itself belongs to the inanimate realm, when it should have been held that consciousness and choice only are inherent in this realm, which is developed into psychic faculties only by the organization of animate bodies. ”

“ To keep the mental eye, like the bodily eye, for any time intently fixed on one object is apt to produce a feeling of giddiness. And in the case of a subject like illusion, the effect is enormously increased by the disturbing character of the object looked at. ”

“ The objects, animate or inanimate, so called, the creatures, the people that surround us, breathe upon us the qualities of their inner life; and we cannot escape the fact, whether conscious of its existence or not. ”

“ The connection between the illusory side of our life and insanity may be seen in another way. All illusion has as its negative condition an interruption of the higher intellectual processes, the due control of our mental representations by reflection and reason. In the case of passive illusions, the error arises from our inability to subordinate the suggestion made by some feature of the present impression to the result of a fuller inspection of the object before us, or of a wider reflection on the past. ”

“ Considering the impossibility of defining the exact line of demarcation between animate and inanimate matter, it is astonishing to find so much stress laid on the supposed fundamental difference between vital and non-vital phenomena. ”

“ The most perfect illusions are those of false motion, relief, or concavity, changed size, distance, etc., produced when, by artificial means, an object gives us sensations, or forces us to move our eyes in ways ordinarily suggestive of the presence of an entirely different object. ”

“ At times, under the influence of an over-excitable imagination acting upon a nature thoroughly superstitious, his intellect wavers, and he is subject to sudden aberrations of mind resembling insanity. ”

“ The nerves of savage man are strangely excited by certain stimuli of touch, smell, taste, sight: the specially exciting object is something that we should call “mysterious,” “weird,” or, still more expressively, “uncanny.” To the primitive mind nothing was more uncanny than blood, and there are people still who faint at the sight of it: for “the blood is the life,” life and death are the great primeval mysteries, and all the physical substances that are associated with the inner principle of either partake of this mysteriousness. ”

“ At length the more acute and speculative few discover that some of the things which the vulgar believe to be animated are inanimate. What use must wise men make of this discovery? Will they affirm that the sun does not shine nor give heat? ”

“ The brain had its own food on which it battened, and the imagination, made grotesque by terror, twisted and distorted as a living thing by pain, danced like some foul puppet on a stand and grinned through moving masks. ”

“ When the hallucinations of the insane are purely intellectual, and wholly and intensely occupy the attention, the generation of animal heat appears less than usual; and decidedly less than in those cases where the aberrations of the mind are connected with the stimulus of selfish and exciting passions,—hence the system is cold. ”

“ Now, in the period termed animistic because inanimate things are supposed to be animated and actuated by spirits, it may be that many or most of such spirits are supposed to feel and think like a rather stupid man, and therefore to be capable of being cajoled, deluded, intimidated, and castigated by the human being who desires to make use of them. ”

“ Nor does this assimilation, or simple generation, take place in animated bodies only, but the inanimate also participate in the same property (as we have observed of flame and air) , and that languid spirit, which is contained in every tangible animated substance, is perpetually working upon the coarser parts, and converting them into spirit, which afterward is exhaled, whence ensues a diminution of weight, and a desiccation of which we have spoken elsewhere. ”

“ That consciousness is essentially hallucination. I, here, and you, and our talk—it is all Illusion. Bring your Science to bear—what am I? A cloudy multitude of atoms, an infinite interplay of little cells. ”

“ Illusions, on the other hand, have real external objects for their cause; but the diseased imagination so falsifies the objects that there is little or no resemblance between the mental vision and the outside reality. ”

“ In its lowest stages illusion closely counterfeits correct perception in the balance of the direct factor, sensation, and the indirect factor, mental reproduction or imagination. The degree of illusion increases in proportion as the imaginative element gains [Pg 121] in force relatively to the present impression; till, in the wild illusions of the insane, the amount of actual impression becomes evanescent. When this point is reached, the act of imagination shows itself as a purely creative process, or an hallucination. ”

“ There are two ways in which madmen people the outside world with phantoms of their own imaginations—by means of illusions and of hallucinations.
Hallucinations are pure figments of the imagination, without any object corresponding to them or suggesting them in the outer world. ”

“ When things abnormal are manifested to the eye of man, an imaginary body assumes shape in the mind and so long as that phantom remains therein, the phenomena continue. (4) The demon destroys equilibrium in the imagination by a disturbance of the vital functions, whether by irregularity in health or actual disease. (5) When some morbid cause has destroyed this equilibrium, and that also of reason, waking dream becomes possible and that which has no existence assumes the semblance of reality. ”

“ We seem to attribute the character of the ‘uncanny’ to all such impressions which seek to confirm the omnipotence of thought and the animistic method of thought in general, though our judgment has long rejected it. ”

“ This is what happens temporarily in the case of the sane, when the mind is held fast by an illusion. And, in states of insanity, we see the process of nervous dissolution beginning with these same nervous structures, and so taking the reverse order of the process of evolution. ”

“ In other words, our minds are dominated by the partial and the particular, to the exclusion of the total or the general. In active illusions, again, the powers of judgment and reflection, including those of calm perception itself, temporarily vacate their throne in favour of imagination. And this same suspension of the higher intellectual functions, the stupefaction of judgment and reflection made more complete and permanent, is just what characterizes insanity. ”

“ Poets and philosophers, time out of mind, have been heartbroken over the enormous mass of evil in the world, and have spoken as though animated nature were one great organism, with a brain in which every pang that afflicted each one of its innumerable members was piled up into a huge, pyramidal agony. ”

“ Your sixth question is, If there be a thorow mixture of the parts of animate and inanimate matter, whether those parts do retain each their own nature and substance, so that the inanimate part of matter remains dull and stupid in its essence or nature, and the animate full of self-motion, or all self-motion? I answer: Although every part and particle of each degree are closely intermixed, nevertheless this mixture doth not alter the interior nature of those parts or degrees; As for example; a man is composed of Soul, and Body, which are several parts, but joyned as into one substance, viz. ”

“ Is it an appalling thought that our normal mental life is thus intimately related to insanity, and graduates away into it by such fine transitions? A moment's reflection will show that the case is not so bad as it seems. ”

“ There are some secret springs in the affections which, when they are set a-going by some object in view, or, though not in view, yet rendered present to the mind by the power of imagination, that motion carries out the soul, by its impetuosity, to such violent, eager embracings of the object, that the absence of it is insupportable. ”

“ Around some single form—the physiognomy, it may be, of Hunger or Disease, of Lust or Cruelty—ignorant imagination has broken up nature into innumerable bits which, like mirrors of various surface, reflect the same in endless sizes and distortions ”

“ But, Sir, does your old philosophy never suggest to you the idea that these new discoveries and emotions, with their consequent anticipations, may be referable to the mysterious action of a disturbed imagination, rather than the direct action of a supernatural power—what scepticism designates the flights of fancy? ”

“ Again, states of anæsthesia lead to odd illusions among the insane. The common supposition that the body is dead, or made of wood or of glass, is clearly referable in part to lowered sensibility of the organism. ”

“ And this intimate relation between the scientific and the philosophic consideration of illusion is abundantly illustrated in the history of philosophy. The errors of sense, appearing in a region which to the vulgar seems so indubitable, have again and again set men thinking on the question, "What is the whole range of illusion? Is perception, as popularly understood, after all, a big hallucination? Is our life a dream?" ”

“ When then, as in the insane, all the restraining powers of the mind are lost, can we wonder that the mental energies should be subject to accidental and baneful influences? that they should impetuously rush with fearful, because with unguided force, into the most opposite and direful extremes? These extremes, however, always correspond to the individual peculiarity of mind, and the nature of the exciting causes, which exciting causes often exist internally long before they become externally evident ”

“ The concluding general observations on this Essay and its Appendix, are, that the one principal object I have had constantly in view, has been the removal of the erroneous impressions and prejudices which exist almost universally against the insane, as if they alone were all furious wild beasts or infernal demons, and which have hitherto excited and still continue to excite a spirit and conduct toward them, productive of a baneful and injurious influence. ”

“ If the mind thus acted upon were a spirit, separated from the body, the result would be merely the feelings, which the motives applied would naturally produce, and not the unnatural feelings of insanity. ”

“ 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. ”

“ We do not realize how much is due to insanity and how much to the supernatural, when, after telling the story of his obsession, his fears that as a climax [298] he will become like those Eyes, the man suddenly sees his reflection in the mirror and meets their dreadful gaze. ”

“ The animistic hypothesis, again, is the result, naturally fallacious, of savage man’s reasonings on life, death, sleep, dreams, trance, breath, shadow and the other kindred biological phenomena. Thus clairvoyance (on the animistic hypothesis) is the flight of the conscious ‘spirit’ of a living man across space or time; the ‘deathbed wraith’ is the visible apparition of the newly-emancipated ‘spirit,’ and ‘spirits’ cause the unexplained disturbances and movements of objects. ”

“ I half expected to see presently great half-formed shapes come rolling up to me to crush me; some thing fiery, not strange, too utterly horrible to be strange, but utterly vile and ugly, the sight of which would have killed me when I was upon the earth, come rolling up to torment me. ”