NOTE.
THE HYPNOTIC CONDITION.
I have not in this chapter discussed the relation of dreaming to hypnotism, or the state of artificially produced quasi-sleep, because the nature of this last is still but very imperfectly understood. In this condition, which is induced in a number of ways by keeping the attention fixed on some non-exciting object, and by weak continuous and monotonous stimulation, as stroking the skin, the patient can be made to act conformably to the verbal or other suggestion of the operator, or to the bodily position which he is made to assume. Thus, for example, if a glass containing ink is given to him, with the command to drink, he proceeds to drink. If his hands are folded, he proceeds to act as if he were in church, and so on.
Braid, the writer who did so much to get at the facts of hypnotism, and Dr. Carpenter who has helped to make known Braid's careful researches, regard the actions of the hypnotized subject as analogous to ideomotor movements; that is to say, the movements due to the tendency of an idea to act itself out apart from volition. On the other hand, one of the latest inquirers into the subject, Professor Heidenhain, of Breslau, appears to regard these actions as the outcome of "unconscious perceptions" (Animal Magnetism, English translation, p. 43, etc.).
In the absence of certain knowledge, it seems allowable to argue from the analogy of natural sleep that the actions of the hypnotized patient are accompanied with the lower forms of consciousness, including sensation and perception, and that they involve dream-like hallucinations respecting the external circumstances of the moment. Regarding them in this light, the points of resemblance between hypnotism and dreaming are numerous and striking. Thus, Dr. Heidenhain tells us that the threshold or liminal value of stimulation is lowered just as in ordinary sleep sense-activity as a whole is lowered. According to Professor Weinhold, the hypnotic condition begins in a gradual loss of taste, touch, and the sense of temperature; then sight is gradually impaired, while hearing remains throughout the least interfered with.[102] In this way, the mind of the patient is largely cut off from the external world, as in sleep, and the power of orientation is lost. Moreover, there are all the conditions present, both positive and negative, for the hallucinatory transformation of mental images into percepts just as in natural sleep. Thus, the higher centres connected with the operations of reflection and reasoning are thrown hors de combat or, as Dr. Heidenhain has it, "inhibited."
The condition of hypnotism is marked off from that of natural sleep, first of all, by the fact that the accompanying hallucinations are wholly due to external suggestion (including the effects of bodily posture). Dreams may, as we have seen, be very faintly modified by external influences, but during sleep there is nothing answering to the perfect control which the operator exercises over the hypnotized subject. The largest quantity of our "dream-stuff" comes, as we have seen, from within and not from without the organism. And this fact accounts for the chief characteristic difference between the natural and the hypnotic dream. The former is complex, consisting of crowds of images, and continually changing: the latter is simple, limited, and persistent. As Braid remarks, the peculiarity of hypnotism is that the attention is concentrated on a remarkably narrow field of mental images and ideas. So long as a particular bodily posture is assumed, so long does the corresponding illusion endure. One result of this, in connection with that impairing of sensibility already referred to, is the scope for a curious overriding of sense-impressions by the dominant illusory percept, a process that we have seen illustrated in the active sense-illusions of waking life. Thus, if salt water is tasted and the patient is told that it is beer, he complains that it is sour.
In being thus in a certain rapport, though so limited and unintelligent a rapport, with the external world, the mind of the hypnotized patient would appear to be nearer the condition of waking illusion than is the mind of the dreamer. It must be remembered, however, and this is the second point of difference between dreaming and hypnotism, that the hypnotized subject tends to act out his hallucinations. His quasi-percepts are wont to transform themselves into actions with a degree of force of which we see no traces in ordinary sleep. Why there should be this greater activity of the motor organs in the one condition than in the other, seems to be a point as yet unexplained. All sense-impressions and percepts are doubtless accompanied by some degree of impulse to movement, though, for some reason or another, in natural and healthy sleep these impulses are restricted to the stage of faint nascent stirrings of motor activity which hardly betray themselves externally. This difference, involving a great difference in the possible practical consequences of the two conditions of natural and hypnotic sleep, clearly serves to bring the latter condition nearer to that of insanity than the former condition is brought. A strong susceptibility to the hypnotic influence, such as Dr. Heidenhain describes, might, indeed, easily prove a very serious want of "adaptation of internal to external relations," whereas a tendency to dreaming would hardly prove a maladaptation at all.
CHAPTER VIII.
ILLUSIONS OF INTROSPECTION.
We have now, perhaps, sufficiently reviewed sense-illusions, both of waking life and of sleep. And having roughly classified them according to their structure and origin, we are ready to go forwards and inquire whether the theory thus reached can be applied to other forms of illusory error. And here we are compelled to inquire at the outset if anything analogous to sense-illusion is to be found in that other great region of presentative cognition usually marked off from external perception as internal perception, self-reflection, or introspection.
Illusions of Introspection defined.
This inquiry naturally sets out with the question: What is meant by introspection? This cannot be better defined, perhaps, than by saying that it is the mind's immediate reflective cognition of its own states as such.
In one sense, of course, everything we know may be called a mental state, actual or imagined. Thus, a sense-impression is known, exactly like any other feeling of the mind, as a mental phenomenon or mental modification. Yet we do not usually speak of introspectively recognizing a sensation. Our sense-impressions are marked off from all other feelings by having an objective character, that is to say, an immediate relation to the external world, so that in attending to one of them our minds pass away from themselves in what Professor Bain calls the attitude of objective regard. Introspection is confined to feelings which want this intimate connection with the external region, and includes sensation only so far as it is viewed apart from external objects and on its mental side as a feeling, a process which is next to impossible where the sensation has little emotional colour, as in the case of an ordinary sensation of sight or of articulate sound.
This being so, errors of introspection, supposing such to be found, will in the main be sufficiently distinguished from those of perception. Even an hallucination of sense, whether setting out from a subjective sensation or not, always contains the semblance of a sense-impression, and so would not be correctly classed with errors of introspection.
Just as introspection must be marked off from perception, so must it be distinguished from memory. It may be contended that, strictly speaking, all introspection is retrospection, since even in attending to a present feeling the mind is reflectively representing to itself the immediately preceding momentary experience of that feeling. Yet the adoption of this view does not hinder us from drawing a broad distinction between acts of introspection and acts of memory. Introspection must be regarded as confined to the knowledge of immediately antecedent mental states with reference to which, no error of memory can be supposed to arise.
It follows from this that an illusion of introspection could only be found in connection with the apprehension of present or immediately antecedent mental states. On the other hand, any illusions connected with the consciousness of personal continuity and identity would fall rather under the class of mnemonic than that of introspective error.
Once more, introspection must be carefully distinguished from what I have called belief. Some of our beliefs may be found to grow out of and be compounded of a number of introspections. Thus, my conception of my own character, or my psychological conception of mind as a whole, may be seen to arise by a combination of the results of a number of acts of introspection. Yet, supposing this to be so, we must still distinguish between the single presentative act of introspection and the representative belief growing out of it.
It follows from this that, though an error of the latter sort might conceivably have its origin in one of the former; though, for example, a man's illusory opinion of himself might be found to involve errors of introspection, yet the two kinds of illusion would be sufficiently unlike. The latter would be a simple presentative error, the former a compound representative error.
Finally, in order to complete this preliminary demarcation of our subject-matter, it is necessary to distinguish between an introspection (apparent or real) of a feeling or idea, and a process of inference based on this feeling. The term introspective knowledge must, it is plain, be confined to what is or appears to be in the mind at the moment of inspection.
By observing this distinction, we are in a position to mark off an illusion of introspection from a fallacy of introspection. The former differs from the latter in the absence of anything like a conscious process of inference. Thus, if we suppose that the derivation by Descartes of the fact of the existence of God from his possession of the idea to be erroneous, such a consciously performed act of reasoning would constitute a fallacy rather than an illusion of introspection.
We may, then, roughly define an illusion of introspection as an error involved in the apprehension of the contents of the mind at any moment. If we mistake the quality or degree of a feeling or the structure of a complex mass of feeling, or if we confuse what is actually present to the mind with some inference based on this, we may be said to fall into an illusion of introspection.
But here the question will certainly be raised: How can we conceive the mind erring as to the nature of its present contents; and what is to determine, if not my immediate act of introspection, what is present in my mind at any moment? Indeed, to raise the possibility of error in introspection seems to do away with the certainty of presentative knowledge.
If, however, the reader will recall what was said in an earlier chapter about the possibility of error in recognizing the quality of a sense-impression, he will be prepared for a similar possibility here. What we are accustomed to call a purely presentative cognition is, in truth, partly representative. A feeling as pure feeling is not known; it is only known when it is distinguished, as to quality or degree, and so classed or brought under some representation of a kind or description of feeling, as acute, painful, and so on. The accurate recognition of an impression of colour depends, as we have seen, on this process of classing being correctly performed. Similarly, the recognition of internal feelings implies the presence of the appropriate or corresponding class-representation. Accordingly, if it is possible for a wrong representation to get substituted for the right one, there seems to be an opening for error.
Any error that would thus arise can, of course, only be determined as such in relation to some other act of introspection of the same mind. In matters of internal perception other minds cannot directly assist us in correcting error as they can in the case of external perception, though, as we shall see by-and-by, they may do so indirectly. The standard of reality directly applicable to introspective cognition is plainly what the individual mind recognizes at its best moments, when the processes of attention and classifying are accurately performed, and the representation may be regarded with certainty as answering to the feeling. In other words, in the sphere of internal, as in that of external experience, the criterion of reality is the average and perfect, as distinguished from the particular variable and imperfect act of cognition.
We see, then, that error in the process of introspection is at least conceivable. And now let us examine this process a little further, in order to find out what probabilities of error attach to it.
To begin with, then, an act of introspection, to be complete, clearly involves the apprehension of an internal feeling or idea as something mental and marked off from the region of external experience. This distinct recognition of internal states of mind as such, in opposition to external impressions, is by no means easy, but presupposes a certain degree of intellectual culture, and a measure of the power of abstract attention.
Confusion of Internal and External Experience.
Accordingly, we find that where this is wanting there is a manifest disposition to translate internal feelings into terms of external impressions. In this way there may arise a slight amount of habitual and approximately constant error. Not that the process approaches to one of hallucination; but only that the internal feelings are intuited as having a cause or origin analogous to that of sense-impressions. Thus to the uncultivated mind a sudden thought seems like an audible announcement from without. The superstitious man talks of being led by some good or evil spirit when new ideas arise in his mind or new resolutions shape themselves. To the simple intelligence of the boor every thought presents itself as an analogue of an audible voice, and he commonly describes his rough musings as saying this and that to himself. And this, mode of viewing the matter is reflected even, in the language of cultivated persons. Thus we say, "The idea struck me," or "was borne in on me," "I was forced to do so and so," and so on, and in this manner we tend to assimilate internal to external mental phenomena.
Much the same thing shows itself in our customary modes of describing our internal feelings of pleasure and pain. When a man in a state of mental depression speaks of having "a load" on his mind it is evident that he is interpreting a mental by help of an analogy to a bodily feeling. Similarly, when we talk of the mind being torn by doubt or worn by anxiety. It would seem as though we tended mechanically to translate mental pleasures and pains into the language of bodily sensations.
The explanation of this deeply rooted tendency to a slightly illusory view of our mental states is, I think, an easy one. For one thing, it follows from the relation of the mental image to the sense-impression that we should tend to assimilate the former to the latter as to its nature and origin. This would account for the common habit of regarding thoughts, which are of course accompanied by representatives of their verbal symbols, as internal voices, a habit which is probably especially characteristic of the child and the uncivilized man, as we have found it to be characteristic of the insane.
Another reason, however, must be sought for the habit of assimilating internal feelings to external sensations. If language has been evolved as an incident of social life, at once one of its effects and its causes, it would seem to follow that it must have first shaped Itself to the needs of expressing these common objective experiences which we receive by way of our senses. Our habitual modes of thought, limited as they are by language, retain traces of this origin. We cannot conceive any mental process except by some vague analogy to a physical process. In other words, we can even now only think with perfect clearness when we are concerned with some object of common cognition. Thus, the sphere of external sensation and of physical agencies furnishes us with the one type of thinkable thing or object of thought, and we habitually view subjective mental states as analogues of these.
Still, it may be said that these slight nascent errors are hardly worth naming, and the question would still appear to recur whether there are other fully developed errors deserving to rank along with illusions of sense. Do we, it may be asked, ever actually mistake the quality, degree, or structure of our internal feelings in the manner hinted above, and if so, what is the range of such error? In order to appreciate the risks of such error, let us compare the process of self-observation with that of external perception with respect to the difficulties in the way of accurate presentative knowledge.
Misreading of Internal Feelings.
First of all, it is noteworthy that a state of consciousness at any one moment is an exceedingly complex thing. It is made up of a mass of feelings and active impulses which often combine and blend in a most inextricable way. External sensations come in groups, too, but as a rule they do not fuse in apparently simple wholes as our internal feelings often do. The very possibility of perception depends on a clear discrimination of sense-elements, for example, the several sensations of colour obtained by the stimulation of different parts of the retina.[103] But no such clearly defined mosaic of feelings presents itself in the internal region: one element overlaps and partly loses itself in another, and subjective analysis is often an exceedingly difficult matter. Our consciousness is thus a closely woven texture in which the mental eye often fails to trace the several threads or strands. Moreover, there is the fact that many of these ingredients are exceedingly shadowy, belonging to that obscure region of sub-consciousness which it is so hard to penetrate with the light of discriminative attention. This remark applies with particular force to that mass of organic feelings which constitutes what is known as cœnæsthesis; or vital sense.
While, to speak figuratively, the minute anatomy of consciousness is thus difficult with respect to longitudinal sections of the mental column, it is no less difficult with respect to transverse sections. Under ordinary circumstances, external impressions persist so that they can be transfixed by a deliberate act of attention, and objects rarely flit over the external scene so rapidly as to allow us no time for a careful recognition of the impression. Not so in the case of the internal region of mind. The composite states of consciousness just described never remain perfectly uniform for the shortest conceivable duration. They change continually, just as the contents of the kaleidoscope vary with every shake of the instrument. Thus, one shade of feeling runs into another in such a way that it is often impossible to detect its exact quality; and even when the character of the feeling does not change, its intensity is undergoing alterations so that an accurate observation of its quantity is impracticable. Also, in this unstable shifting internal scene features may appear for a duration too short to allow of close recognition. In this way it happens that we cannot sharply divide the feeling of the moment from its antecedents and its consequents.
If, now, we take these facts in connection with what has been said above respecting the nature of the process of introspection, the probability of error will be made sufficiently clear. To transfix any particular feeling of the moment, to selectively attend to it, and to bring it under the proper representation, is an operation that requires time, a time which, though short, is longer than the fugitive character of so much of our internal mental life allows. From all of which it would appear to follow that it must be very easy to overlook, confuse, and transform, both as to quality and as to quantity, the actual ingredients of our internal consciousness.
From these sources there spring a number of small errors of introspection which, to distinguish them from others to be spoken of presently, may be called passive. These would include all errors in detecting what is in consciousness due to the intricacies of the phenomena, and not aided by any strong basis. For example, a mental state may fail to disclose its component parts to introspective attention. Thus, a motive may enter into our action which is so entangled with other feelings as to escape our notice. The fainter the feeling the greater the difficulty of detaching it and inspecting it in isolation. Again, an error of introspection may have its ground in the fugitive character of a feeling. If, for example, a man is asked whether a rapid action was a voluntary one, he may in retrospection easily imagine that it was not so, when as a matter of fact the action was preceded by a momentary volition. When a person exclaims, "I did a thing inadvertently or mechanically," it often means that he did not note the motive underlying the action. Such transitory feelings which cannot at the moment be seized by an act of attention are pretty certain to disappear at once, leaving not even a temporary trace in consciousness.
We will now pass to the consideration of other illusions of introspection more analogous to what I have called the active illusions of perception. In our examination of these we found that a pure representation may under certain circumstances simulate the appearance of a presentation, that a mental image may approximate to a sense-impression. In the case of the internal feelings this liability shows itself in a still more striking form.
The higher feelings or emotions are distinguished from the simple sense-feelings in being largely representative. Thus, a feeling of contentment at any moment, though no doubt conditioned by the bodily state and the character of the organic sensations or cœnæsthesis, commonly depends for the most part on intellectual representations of external circumstances or relations, and may be called an ideal foretaste of actual satisfactions, such as the pleasures of success, of companionship, and so on. 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. Thus, it is said of Garrick, that when acting Richard III., he felt himself for the moment to be a villain.
We should expect from all this that in the act of introspection the mind is apt, within certain limits, to find what it is prepared to find. And since there is in these acts often a distinct wish to detect some particular feeling, we can see how easy it must be for a man through bias and a wrong focussing of the attention to deceive himself up to a certain point with respect to the actual contents of his mind.
Let us examine one of these active illusions a little more fully. It would at first sight seem to be a perfectly simple thing to determine at any given moment whether we are enjoying ourselves, whether our emotional condition rises above the pleasure-threshold or point of indifference and takes on a positive hue of the agreeable or pleasurable. Yet there is good reason for supposing that people not unfrequently deceive themselves on this matter. It is, perhaps, hardly an exaggeration to say that most of us are capable of imagining that we are having enjoyment when we conform to the temporary fashion of social amusement. It has been cynically observed that people go into society less in order to be happy than to seem so, and one may add that in this semblance of enjoyment they may, provided they are not blasé, deceive themselves as well as others. The expectation of enjoyment, the knowledge that the occasion is intended to bring about this result, the recognition of the external signs of enjoyment in others—all this may serve to blind a man in the earlier stages of social amusement to his actual mental condition.
If we look closely into this variety of illusion, we shall see that it is very similar in its structure and origin to that kind of erroneous perception which arises from inattention to the actual impression of the moment under the influence of a strong expectation of something different. The representation of ourselves as entertained dislodges from our internal field of vision our actual condition, relegating this to the region of obscure consciousness. Could we for a moment get rid of this representation and look at the real feelings of the time, we should become aware of our error; and it is possible that the process of becoming blasé involves a waking up to a good deal of illusion of the kind.
Just as we can thus deceive ourselves within certain limits as to our emotional condition, so we can mistake the real nature of our intellectual condition. Thus, when an idea is particularly grateful to our minds, we may easily imagine that we believe it, when in point of fact all the time there is a sub-conscious process of criticism going on, which if we attended to it for a moment would amount to a distinct act of disbelief. Some persons appear to be capable of going on habitually practising this petty deceit on themselves, that is to say, imagining they believe what in fact they are strongly inclined to doubt. Indeed, this remark applies to all the grateful illusions respecting ourselves and others, which will have to be discussed by-and-by. The impulse to hold to the illusion in spite of critical reflection, involves the further introspective illusion of taking a state of doubt for one of assurance. Thus, the weak, flattered man or woman manages to keep up a sort of fictitious belief in the truth of the words which are so pleasant to the ear.
It is plain that the external conditions of life impose on the individual certain habits of feeling which often conflict with his personal propensities. As a member of society he has a powerful motive to attribute certain feelings to himself, and this motive acts as a bias in disturbing his vision of what is actually in his mind. While this holds good of lighter matters, as that of enjoyment just referred to, it applies still more to graver matters. Thus, for example, a man may easily persuade himself that he feels a proper sentiment of indignation against a perpetrator of some mean or cruel act, when as a matter of fact his feeling is much more one of compassion for the previously liked offender. In this way we impose on ourselves, disguising our real sentiments by a thin veil of make-believe.
So far I have spoken of an illusion of introspection as analogous to the slight misapprehensions of sense-impression which were touched on in connection with illusions of sense (Chapter III.). It is to be observed, however, that the confusing of elements of consciousness, which is so prominent a factor in introspective illusion, involves a species of error closely analogous to a complete illusion of perception, that is to say, one which involves a misinterpretation of a sense-impression.
This variety of illusion is illustrated in the case in which a present feeling or thought is confounded with some inference based on it. For example, a present thought may, through forgetfulness, be regarded as a new discovery. Its originality appears to be immediately made known in the very freshness which characterizes it. Every author probably has undergone the experience of finding that ideas which started up to his mind as fresh creations, were unconscious reminiscences of his own or of somebody else's ideas.
In the case of present emotional states this liability to confuse the present and the past is far greater. Here there is something hardly distinguishable from an active illusion of sense-perception. In this condition of mind a man often says that he has an "intuition" of something supposed to be immediately given in the feeling itself. For instance, one whose mind is thrilled by the pulsation of a new joy exclaims, "This is the happiest moment of my life," and the assurance seems to be contained in the very intensity of the feeling itself. Of course, cool reflection will tell him that what he affirms is merely a belief, the accuracy of which presupposes processes of recollection and judgment, but to the man's mind at the moment the supremacy of this particular joy is immediately intuited. And so with the assurance that the present feeling, for example of love, is undying, that it is equal to the most severe trials, and so on. A man is said to feel at the moment that it is so, though as the facts believed have reference to absent circumstances and events, it is plain that the knowledge is by no means intuitive.
At such times our minds are in a state of pure feeling: intellectual discrimination and comparison are no longer possible. In this way our emotions in the moments of their greatest intensity carry away our intellects with them, confusing the region of pure imagination with that of truth and certainty, and even the narrow domain of the present with the vast domain of the past and future. In this condition differences of present and future may be said to disappear and the energy of the emotion to constitute an immediate assurance of its existence absolutely.[104]
The great region for the illustration of these active illusions is that of the moral and religious life. With respect to our real motives, our dominant aspirations, and our highest emotional experiences, we are greatly liable to deceive ourselves. The moralist and the theologian have clearly recognized the possibilities of self-deception in matters of feeling and impulse. To them it is no mystery that the human heart should mistake the fictitious for the real, the momentary and evanescent for the abiding. And they have recognized, too, the double bias in these errors, namely, the powerful disposition to exaggerate the intensity and persistence of a present feeling on the one hand, and on the other hand to take a mere wish to feel in a particular way for the actual possession of the feeling.
Philosophic Illusions.
The opinion of theologians respecting the nature of moral introspection presents a singular contrast to that entertained by some philosophers as to the nature of self-consciousness. It is supposed by many of these that in interrogating their internal consciousness they are lifted above all risk of error. The "deliverance of consciousness" is to them something bearing the seal of a supreme authority, and must not be called in question. And so they make an appeal to individual consciousness a final resort in all matters of philosophical dispute.
Now, on the face of it, it does not seem probable that this operation should have an immunity from all liability to error. For the matters respecting which we are directed to introspect ourselves, are the most subtle and complex things of our intellectual and emotional life. And some of these philosophers even go so far as to affirm that the plain man is quite equal to the niceties of this process.
It has been brought as a charge against some of these same philosophers that they have based certain of their doctrines on errors of introspection. This charge must, of course, be received with some sort of suspicion here, since it has been brought forward by avowed disciples of an opposite philosophic school. Nevertheless, as there is from our present disinterested and purely scientific point of view a presumption that philosophers like other men are fallible, and since it is certain that philosophical introspection does not materially differ from other kinds, it seems permissible just to glance at some of these alleged illusions in relation to other and more vulgar forms. Further reference to them will be made at the end of our study.
These so-called philosophical illusions will be found, like the vulgar ones just spoken of, to illustrate the distinction drawn between passive and active illusions. That is to say, the alleged misreading of individual consciousness would result now from a confusion of distinct elements, including wrong suggestion, due to the intricacies of the phenomena, now from a powerful predisposition to read something into the phenomena.
A kind of illusion in which the passive element seems most conspicuous would be the error into which the interrogator of the individual consciousness is said to fall respecting simple unanalyzable states of mind. On the face of it, it is not likely that a mere inward glance at the tangle of conscious states should suffice to determine what is such a perfectly simple mental phenomenon. Accordingly, when a writer declares that an act of introspection demonstrates the simple unanalyzable character of such a feeling as the sentiment of beauty or that of moral approval, the opponent of this view clearly has some show of argument for saying that this simplicity may be altogether illusory and due to the absence of a perfect act of attention. Similarly, when it is said that the idea of space contains no representations of muscular sensation, the statement may clearly arise from the want of a sufficiently careful kind of introspective analysis.[105]
In most cases of these alleged philosophical errors, however, the active and passive factors seem to combine. There are certain intricacies in the mental phenomenon itself favouring the chances of error, and there are independent predispositions leading the mind to look at the phenomenon in a wrong way. This seems to apply to the famous declaration of a certain school of thinkers that by an act of introspection we can intuit the fact of liberty, that is to say, a power of spontaneous determination of action superior to and regulative of the influence of motives. It may be plausibly contended that this idea arises partly from a mixing up of facts of present consciousness with inferences from them, and partly from a natural predisposition of the mind to invest itself with this supreme power of absolute origination.[106]
In a similar way, it might be contended that other famous philosophic dicta are founded on a process of erroneous introspection of subjective mental states. In some cases, indeed, it seems a plausible explanation to regard these illusions as mere survivals in attenuated shadowy form of grosser popular illusions. But this is not yet the time to enter on these, which, moreover, hardly fall perhaps under our definition of an illusion of introspection.
Value of the Introspective Method.
In drawing up this rough sketch of the illusions of introspection, I have had no practical object in view. I have tried to look at the facts as they are apart from any conclusions to be drawn from them. The question how far the liability to error in any region of inquiry vitiates the whole process is a difficult one; and the question whether the illusions to which we are subject in introspection materially affect the value of self-knowledge as a whole and consequently of the introspective method in psychology, as many affirm, is too subtle a one to be fully treated now. All that I shall attempt here is to show that it does not do this any more than the risk of sense-illusion can be said materially to affect the value of external observation.
It is to be noted first of all that the errors of introspection are much more limited than those of sense-perception. They broadly answer to the slight errors connected with the discrimination and recognition of the sense-impression. There is nothing answering to a complete hallucination in the sphere of the inner mental life. It follows, too, from what has been said above, that the amount of active error in introspection is insignificant, since the representation of a feeling or belief is so very similar to the actual experience of it.
In brief, the errors of introspection, though numerous, are all too slight to render the process of introspection as a whole unsound and untrustworthy. Though, as we have seen, it involves, strictly speaking, an ingredient of representation, this fact does not do away with the broad distinction between presentative and representative cognition. Introspection is presentative in the sense that the reality constituting the object of cognition, the mind's present feeling, is as directly present to the knowing mind as anything can be conceived to be. It may be added that the power of introspection is a comparatively new acquisition of the human race, and that, as it improves, the amount of error connected with its operation may reasonably be expected to become infinitesimal.
It is often supposed by those who undervalue the introspective method in psychology that there is a special difficulty in the detection of error in introspection, owing to the fact that the object of inspection is something individual and private, and not open to common scrutiny as the object of external perception. Yet, while allowing a certain force to this objection I would point out, first of all, that even in sense-perception, what the individual mind is immediately certain of is its own sensations. The relatively perfect certainty which finally attaches to the presentative side of sense-perception is precisely that which finally attaches to the results of introspection.
In the second place, it may be said that the contrast between the inner and the outer experience is much less than it seems. In many cases our emotions are the direct result of a common external cause, and even when they are not thus attached to some present external circumstance, we are able, it is admitted, by the use of language, roughly to compare our individual feelings. And such comparison is continually bringing to light the fact that there is a continuity in our mental structure, that our highest thoughts and emotions lead us back to our common sense-impressions, and that consequently, in spite of all individual differences of temperament and mental organization, our inner experience is in all its larger features a common experience.
I may add that this supposition of the common nature of our internal experience, as a whole, not only underlies the science of psychology, but is implied in the very process of detecting and correcting errors of introspection. I do not mean that in matters of feeling "authority" is to override "private judgment." Our last resort with respect to things of the mind is, as I have said, that of careful self-inspection. And the progress of psychology and the correction of illusion proceed by means of an ever-improving exercise of the introspective faculty. Yet such individual inspection can at least be guided by the results of others' similar inspection, and should be so guided as soon as a general consensus in matters of internal experience is fairly made out. In point of fact, the preceding discussion of illusions of introspection has plainly rested on the sufficiently verified assumption that the calmest and most efficient kind of introspection, in bringing to light what is permanent as compared with what is variable in the individual cognition, points in the direction of a common body of introspected fact.
CHAPTER IX.
OTHER QUASI-PRESENTATIVE ILLUSIONS: ERRORS OF
INSIGHT.
Besides the perception of external objects, and the inspection of our internal mental states, there are other forms of quasi-presentative cognition which need to be touched on here, inasmuch as they are sometimes erroneous and illusory.
In the last chapter I alluded to the fact that emotion may arise as the immediate accompaniment of a sense-impression. When this is the case there is a disposition to read into the external object a quality answering to the emotion, just as there is a disposition to ascribe to objects qualities of heat and cold answering to the sensations thus called. And such a reference of an emotional result to an external exciting cause approximates in character to an immediate intuition. The cognition of the quality is instantaneous, and quite free from any admixture of conscious inference. Accordingly, we have to inquire into the illusory forms of such intuition, if such there be.
Æsthetic Intuition.
Conspicuous among these quasi-presentative emotional cognitions is æsthetic intuition, that is to say, the perception of an object as beautiful. It is not necessary here to raise the question whether there is, strictly speaking, any quality in things answering to the sentiment of beauty in our minds: this is a philosophical and not a psychological question, and turns on the further question, what we mean by object. All that we need to assume here is that there are certain aspects of external things, certain relations of form, together with a power of exciting certain pleasurable ideas in the spectator's mind, which are commonly recognized as the cause of the emotion of beauty, and indeed regarded as constituting the embodiments of the objective quality, beauty. Æsthetic intuition thus clearly implies the immediate assurance of the existence of a common source of æsthetic delight, a source bound up with an object of common sense-perception. And so we may say that to call a thing beautiful is more or less distinctly to recognize it as a cause of a present emotion, and to attribute to it a power of raising a kindred emotion in other minds.
Æsthetic Illusion.
According to this view of the matter, an illusion of æsthetic intuition would arise whenever this power of affecting a number of minds pleasurably is wrongly attributed, by an act of "intuition," to an object of sense-perception, on the ground of a present personal feeling.
Now, this error is by no means unfrequent. Our delight in viewing external things, though agreeing up to a certain point, does not agree throughout. It is a trite remark that there is a large individual factor, a considerable "personal equation," in matters of taste, as in other matters. Permanent differences of natural sensibility, of experience, of intellectual habits, and so on, make an object æsthetically impressive and valuable to one man and not to another. Yet these differences tend to be overlooked. The individual mind, filled with delight at some spectacle, automatically projects its feeling outwards in the shape of a cause of a common sentiment. And the force of this impulse cannot be altogether explained as the effect of past experiences and of association. It seems to involve, in addition, the play of social instincts, the impulse of the individual mind to connect itself in sympathy with the collective mind.
Here, as in the other varieties of illusion already treated of, we may distinguish between a passive and an active side; only in this case the passive side must not be taken as corresponding to any common suggestions of the object, as in the case of perception proper. So far as an illusion of æsthetic intuition may be considered as passive, it must be due to the effect of circumscribed individual associations with the object.
All agree that what is called beauty consists, to a considerable extent, of a power of awaking pleasant suggestions, but in order that these should constitute a ground of æsthetic value, they must be common, participated in by all, or at least by an indefinite number. This will be the case when the association rests on our common every-day experiences, and our common knowledge of things, as in the case of the peaceful beauty of an ascending curl of blue smoke in a woody landscape, or the awful beauty of a lofty precipice. On the other hand, when the experience and recollections, which are the source of the pleasure, are restricted and accidental, any attribution of objective worth is illusory. Thus, the ascription of beauty to one's native village, to one's beloved friends, and so on, in so far as it carries the conviction of objective worth, may imply a confusion of the individual with the common experience.
The active side of this species of illusions would be illustrated in every instance of ascribing beauty to objects which is due, in a considerable measure at least, to some pre-existing disposition in the mind, whether permanent or temporary. A man brings his peculiar habits of thought and feeling to the contemplation of objects, and the æsthetic impression produced is coloured by these predispositions. Thus, a person of a sad and gloomy cast of mind will be disposed to see a sombre beauty where other eyes see nothing of the kind. And then there are all the effects of temporary conditions of the imagination and the feelings. Thus, the individual mind may be focussed in a certain way through the suggestion of another. People not seldom see a thing to be beautiful because they are told that it is so. It might not be well to inquire too curiously how many of the frequenters of the annual art exhibitions use their own eyes in framing their æsthetic judgments. Or the temporary predisposition may reside in a purely personal feeling or desire uppermost at the time. Our enjoyment of nature or of art is coloured by our temporary mood. There are moments of exceptional mental exhilaration, when even a commonplace scene will excite an appreciable kind of admiration. Or there may be a strong wish to find a thing beautiful begotten of another feeling. Thus, a lover desires to find beauty in his mistress; or, having found it in her face and form, desires to find a harmonious beauty in her mind. In these different ways temporary accidents of personal feeling and imagination enter into and determine our æsthetic intuition, making it deviate from the common standard. This kind of error may even approximate in character to an hallucination of sense when there is nothing answering to a common source of æsthetic pleasure. Thus, the fond mother, through the very force of her affection, will construct a beauty in her child, which for others is altogether non-existent.
What applies to the perception of beauty in the narrow sense will apply to all other modes of æsthetic intuition, as that of the sublime and the ludicrous, and the recognition of the opposite of beauty or the ugly. In like manner, it will apply to moral intuition in so far as it is an instantaneous recognition of a certain quality in a perceived action based on, or at least conjoined with, a particular emotional effect. In men's intuitive judgments respecting the right and the wrong, the noble and base, the admirable and contemptible, and so on, we may see the same kind of illusory universalizing of personal feeling as we have seen in their judgments respecting the beautiful. And the sources of the error are the same in the two cases. Accidents of experience, giving special associations to the actions, will not unfrequently warp the individual intuition. Ethical culture, like æsthetic culture, means a continual casting aside of early illusory habits of intuition. And further, moral intuition illustrates all those effects of feeling which we have briefly traced in the case of æsthetic intuition. The perversions of the moral intuition under the sway of prejudice are too familiar to need more than a bare allusion.
Nature of Insight.
There remains one further mode of cognition which approximates in character to presentative knowledge, and is closely related to external perception. I refer to the commonly called "intuitive" process by which we apprehend the feelings and thoughts of other minds through the external signs of movement, vocal sound, etc., which make up expression and language. This kind of knowledge, which is not sufficiently marked off from external perception on the one side and introspection on the other, I venture to call Insight.
I am well aware that this interpretation of the mental states of others is commonly described as a process of inference involving a conscious reference to our own similar experiences. I willingly grant that it is often so. At the same time, it must be perfectly plain that it is not always so. It is, indeed, doubtful whether in its first stages in early life it is invariably so, for there seem to be good reasons for attributing to the infant mind a certain degree of instinctive or inherited capability in making out the looks and tones of others.[107] And, however this may be, it is certain that with the progress of life a good part of this interpretation comes to be automatic or unconscious, approximating in character to a sense-perception. To recognize contentment in a placid smile is, one would say, hardly less immediate and intuitive than to recognize the coolness of a stream.
We must, of course, all allow that the fusion of the presentative and the representative element is, speaking generally, more complete in the case of sense-perception than in that here considered. In spite of Berkeley's masterly account of the rationale of visual perception as an interpretation of "visual language" and all that has confirmed it, the plain man cannot, at the moment of looking at an object, easily bring himself to admit that distance is not directly present to his vision. On the other hand, on cool reflection, he will recognize that the complacent benevolent sentiment is distinct from the particular movements and changes in the eye and other features which express it. Yet, while admitting this, I must contend that there is no very hard and fast line dividing the two processes, but that the reading of others' feelings approximates in character to an act of perception.
An intuitive insight may, then, be defined as that instantaneous, automatic, or "unconscious" mode of interpreting another's feeling which occurs whenever the feeling is fully expressed, and when its signs are sufficiently familiar to us. This definition will include the interpretation of thoughts by means of language, though not, of course, the belief in an objective fact grounded on a recognition of another's belief. On the other hand, it will exclude all the more complex interpretations of looks and words which imply conscious comparison, reflection, and reasoning. Further, it will exclude a large part of the interpretation of actions as motived, since this, though sometimes approaching the intuitive form, is for the most part a process of conjectural or doubtful inference, and wanting in the immediate assurance which belongs to an intuitive reading of a present emotion or thought.
From this short account of the process of insight, its relation to perception and introspection becomes pretty plain. On the one hand, it closely resembles sense-perception, since it proceeds by the interpretation of a sense-impression by means of a representative image. On the other hand, it differs from sense-perception, and is more closely allied to introspection in the fact that, while the process of interpretation in the former case is a reconstruction of external experiences, in the latter case it is a reconstruction of internal experiences. To intuit another's feeling is clearly to represent to ourselves a certain kind of internal experience previously known, in its elements at least, by introspection, while these represented experiences are distinctly referred to another personality.
And now we see what constitutes the object of insight. This is, in part, a common experience, as in the case of sense-perception and æsthetic intuition, since to perceive another's feeling is implicitly to cognize the external conditions of a common insight. But this is clearly not the whole, nor even the main part of objective reality in this act of cognition. An intuitive insight differs from a sense-perception in that it involves an immediate assurance of the existence of a feeling presentatively known, though not to our own minds. The object in insight is thus a presentative feeling as in introspection, though not our own, but another's. And so it differs from the object in sense-perception in so far as this last involves sense-experiences, as muscular and tactual feelings, which are not at the moment presentatively known to any mind.
Illusions of Insight.
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.
An illusion of insight, like the other varieties of illusion already dealt with, may arise either by way of wrong suggestion or by way of a warping preconception. Let us look at each of these sources apart.
Our insights, like our perceptions, though intuitive in form, are obviously determined by previous experience, association, and habit. Hence, on its passive side, an illusion of insight may be described as a wrong interpretation of a new or exceptional case. For example, having associated the representation of a slight feeling of astonishment with uplifted eyebrows, we irresistibly tend to see a face in which this is a constant feature as expressing this particular shade of emotion. In this way we sometimes fall into grotesque errors as to mental traits. And the most practised physiognomist may not unfrequently err by importing the results of his special circle of experiences into new and unlike cases.
Much the same thing occurs in language. Our timbre of voice, our articulation, and our vocabulary, like our physiognomy, have about them something individual, and error often arises from overlooking this, and hastily reading common interpretations into exceptional cases. The misunderstandings that arise even among the most open and confiding friends sufficiently illustrate this liability to error.
Sometimes the error becomes more palpable, as, for example, when we visit another country. A foreign language, when heard, provokingly suggests all kinds of absurd meanings through analogies to our familiar tongue. Thus, the Englishman who visits Germany cannot, for a time, hear a lady use the expression, "Mein Mann," without having the amusing suggestion that the speaker is wishing to call special attention to the fact of her husband's masculinity. And doubtless the German who visits us derives a similar kind of amusement from such involuntary comparisons.
A fertile source of illusory insight is, of course, conscious deception on the part of others. The rules of polite society require us to be hypocrites in a small way, and we have occasionally to affect the signs of amiability, interest, and amusement, when our actual sentiment is one of indifference, weariness, or even positive antipathy. And in this way a good deal of petty illusion arises. Although we may be well aware of the general untrustworthiness of this society behaviour, such is the force of association and habit, that the bland tone and flattering word irresistibly excite a momentary feeling of gratification, an effect which is made all the more easy by the co-operation of the recipient's own wishes, touched on in the last chapter.
Among all varieties of this deception, that of the stage is the most complete. The actor is a man who has elaborately trained himself in the simulation of certain feelings. And when his acting is of the best quality, and the proper bodily attitude, gesture, tone of voice, and so on, are hit off, the force of the illusion completely masters us. For the moment we lose sight of the theatrical surroundings, and see the actor as really carried away by the passion which he so closely imitates. Histrionic illusion is as complete as any artistic variety can venture to be.[108]
I have said that our insights are limited by our own mental experience, and so by introspection. In truth, every interpretation of another's look and word is determined ultimately, not by what we have previously observed in others, but by what we have personally felt, or at least have in a sense made our own by intense sympathy. Hence we may, in general, regard an illusion of insight on the active side as a hasty projection of our own feelings, thoughts, etc., into other minds.
We habitually approach others with a predisposition to attribute to them our own modes of thinking and feeling. And this predisposition will be the more powerful, the more desirous we are for sympathy, and for that confirmation of our own views which the reflection of another mind affords. Thus, when making a new acquaintance, people are in general disposed to project too much of themselves into the person who is the object of inspection. They intuitively endow him with their own ideas, ways of looking at things, prejudices of sentiment, and so on, and receive something like a shock when later on they find out how different he is from this first hastily formed and largely performed image.
The same thing occurs in the reading of literature, and the appreciation of the arts of expression generally. We usually approach an author with a predisposition to read our own habits of thought and sentiment into his words. It is probably a characteristic defect of a good deal of current criticism of remote writers to attribute to them too much of our modern conceptions and aims. Similarly, we often import our own special feelings into the utterances of the poet and of the musical composer. That much of this intuition is illusory, may be seen by a little attention to the "intuitions" of different critics. Two readers of unlike emotional organization will find incompatible modes of feeling in the same poet. And everybody knows how common it is for musical critics and amateurs to discover quite dissimilar feelings in the same composition.[109]
The effect of this active projection of personal feeling will, of course, be seen most strikingly when there is a certain variety of feeling actually excited at the time in the observer's mind. A man who is in a particularly happy mood tends to reflect his exuberant gladness on others. The lover, in the moment of exalted emotion, reads a response to all his aspirations in his mistress's eyes. Again, a man will tend to project his own present ideas into the minds of others, and so imagine that they know what he knows; and this sometimes leads to a comical kind of embarrassment, and even to a betrayal of something which it was the interest of the person to keep to himself. Once more, in interpreting language, we may sometimes catch ourselves mistaking the meaning, owing to the presence of a certain idea in the mind at the time. Thus, if I have just been thinking of Comte, and overhear a person exclaim, "I'm positive," I irresistibly tend, for the moment, to ascribe to him an avowal of discipleship to the great positivist.
Poetic Illusion.
The most remarkable example of this projection of feeling is undoubtedly illustrated in the poetic interpretation of inanimate nature. The personification of tree, mountain, ocean, and so on, illustrates, no doubt, the effect of association and external suggestion; for there are limits to such personification. But resemblance and suggestion commonly bear, in this case, but a small proportion to active constructive imagination. One might, perhaps, call this kind of projection the hallucination of insight, since there is nothing objective corresponding to the interpretative image.
The imaginative and poetic mind is continually on the look out for hints of life, consciousness, and emotion in nature. It finds a certain kind of satisfaction in this half-illusory, dream-like transformation of nature. The deepest ground of this tendency must probably be looked for in the primitive ideas of the race, and the transmission by inheritance of the effect of its firmly fixed habits of mind. The undisciplined mind of early man, incapable of distinguishing the object of perception from the product of spontaneous imagination, and taking his own double existence as the type of all existence, actually saw the stream, the ocean, and the mountain as living beings; and so firmly rooted is this way of regarding objects, that even our scientifically trained minds find it a relief to relapse occasionally into it.[110]
While there is this general imaginative disposition in the poetic mind to endow nature with life and consciousness, there are special tendencies to project the individual feelings into objects. Every imaginative mind looks for reflections of its own deepest feelings in the world about it. The lonely embittered heart, craving for sympathy, which he cannot meet with in his fellow-man, finds traces of it in the sighing of the trees or the moaning of the sad sea-wave. Our Poet Laureate, in his great elegy, has abundantly illustrated this impulse of the imagination to reflect its own emotional colouring on to inanimate things: for example in the lines—
"The wild unrest that lives in woe
Would dote and pore on yonder cloud
That rises upward always higher,
And onward drags a labouring breast,
And topples round the dreary west,
A looming bastion fringed with fire."
So far I have been considering active illusions of insight as arising through the play of the impulse of the individual mind to project its feelings outwards, or to see their reflections in external things. I must now add that active illusion may be due to causes similar to those which we have seen to operate in the sphere of illusory perception and introspection. That is to say, there may be a disposition, permanent or temporary, to ascribe a certain kind of feeling to others in accordance with our wishes, fears, and so on.
To give an illustration of the permanent causes, it is well known that a conceited man will be disposed to attribute admiration of himself to others. On the other hand, a shy, timid person will be prone to read into other minds the opposite kind of feeling.
Coming to temporary forces, we find that any expectation to meet with a particular kind of mental trait in a new acquaintance will dispose the observer hastily and erroneously to attribute corresponding feelings to the person. And if this expectation springs out of a present feeling, the bias to illusory insight is still more powerful. For example, a child that fears its parent's displeasure will be prone to misinterpret the parent's words and actions, colouring them according to its fears. So an angry man, strongly desirous of making out that a person has injured him, will be disposed to see signs of conscious guilt in this person's looks or words. Similarly, a lover will read fine thoughts or sentiments into the mind of his mistress under the influence of a strong wish to admire.
And what applies to the illusory interpretation of others' feelings applies to the ascription of feelings to inanimate objects. This is due not simply to the impulse to expand one's conscious existence through far-reaching resonances of sympathy, but also to a permanent or temporary disposition to attribute a certain kind of feeling to an object. Thus, the poet personifies nature in part because his emotional cravings prompt him to construct the idea of something that can be admired or worshipped. Once more, the action of a momentary feeling when actually excited is seen in the "mechanical" impulse of a man to retaliate when he strikes his foot against an object, as a chair, which clearly involves a tendency to attribute an intention to hurt to the unoffending body, and the rationale of which odd procedure is pretty correctly expressed in the popular phrase: "It relieves the feelings."
It is worth noting, perhaps, that these illusions of insight, like those of perception, may involve an inattention to the actual impression of the moment. To erroneously attribute a feeling to another through an excess of sympathetic eagerness is often to overlook what a perfectly dispassionate observer would see, as, for example, the immobility of the features or the signs of a deliberate effort to simulate. This inattention will, it is obvious, be greatest in the poetic attribution of life and personality to natural objects, in so far as this approximates to a complete momentary illusion. To see a dark overhanging rock as a grim sombre human presence, is for the moment to view it under this aspect only, abstracting from its many obvious unlikenesses.
In the same manner, a tendency to read a particular meaning into a word may lead to the misapprehension of the word. To give an illustration: I was lately reading the fifth volume of G. H. Lewes's Problems of Life and Mind. In reading the first sentence of one of the sections, I again and again fell into the error of taking "The great Lagrange," for "The great Language." On glancing back I saw that the section was headed "On Language," and I at once recognized the cause of my error in the pre-existence in my mind of the representative image of the word "language."
In concluding this short account of the errors of insight, I may observe that their range is obviously much greater than that of the previously considered classes of presentative illusion. This is, indeed, involved in what has been said about the nature of the process. Insight, as we have seen, though here classed with preservative cognition, occupies a kind of border-land between immediate knowledge or intuition and inference, shading off from the one to the other. And in the very nature of the case the scope for error must be great. Even overlooking human reticence, and, what is worse, human hypocrisy, the conditions of an accurate reading of others' minds are rarely realized. If, as has been remarked by a good authority, one rarely meets, even among intelligent people, with a fairly accurate observer of external things, what shall be said as to the commonly claimed power of "intuitive insight" into other people's thoughts and feelings, as though it were a process above suspicion? It is plain, indeed, on a little reflection, that, taking into account what is required in the way of large and varied experience (personal and social), a habit of careful introspection, as well as a habit of subtle discriminative attention to the external signs of mental life, and lastly, a freedom from prepossession and bias, only a very few can ever hope even to approximate to good readers of character.
And then we have to bear in mind that this large amount of error is apt to remain uncorrected. There is not, as in the case of external perception, an easy way of verification, by calling in another sense; a misapprehension, once formed, is apt to remain, and I need hardly say that errors in these matters of mutual comprehension have their palpable practical consequences. All social cohesion and co-operation rest on this comprehension, and are limited by its degree of perfection. Nay, more, all common knowledge itself, in so far as it depends on a mutual communication of impressions, ideas, and beliefs, is limited by the fact of this great liability to error in what at first seems to be one of the most certain kinds of knowledge.
In view of this depressing amount of error, our solace must be found in the reflection that this seemingly perfect instrument of intuitive insight is, in reality, like that of introspection, in process of being fashioned. Mutual comprehension has only become necessary since man entered the social state, and this, to judge by the evolutionist's measure of time, is not so long ago. A mental structure so complex and delicate requires for its development a proportionate degree of exercise, and it is not reasonable to look yet for perfect precision of action. Nevertheless, we may hope that, with the advance of social development, the faculty is continually gaining in precision and certainty. And, indeed, this hope is already assured to us in the fact that the faculty has begun to criticise itself, to distinguish between an erroneous and a true form of its-operation. In fact, all that has been here said about illusions of insight has involved the assumption that intellectual culture sharpens the power and makes it less liable to err.