Not only may dreams beget these momentary illusions of memory, they may give rise to something like permanent illusions. If a dream serves to connect a certain idea with a place or person, and subsequent experience does not tend to correct this, we may keep the belief that we have actually witnessed the event. And we may naturally expect that this result will occur most frequently in the case of those who habitually dream vividly, as young children.
It seems to me that many of the quaint fancies which children get into their heads about things they hear of arise in this way. I know a person who, when a child, got the notion that when his baby-brother was weaned, he was taken up on a grassy hill and tossed about. He had a vivid idea of having seen this curious ceremony. He has in vain tried to get an explanation of this picturesque rendering of an incident of babyhood from his friends, and has come to the conclusion that it was the result of a dream. If, as seems probable, children's dreams thus give rise to subsequent illusions of memory, the fact would throw a curious light on some of the startling quasi-records of childish experience to be met with in autobiographical literature.
Odd though it may at first appear, old age is said to resemble youth in this confusion of dream-recollection with the memory of waking experience. Dr. Carpenter[128] tells us of "a lady of advanced age who ... continually dreams about passing events, and seems entirely unable to distinguish between her dreaming and her waking experiences, narrating the former with implicit belief in them, and giving directions based on them." This confusion in the case of the old may possibly arise not from an increase in the intensity of the dreams, but from a decrease in the intensity of the waking impressions. As Sir Henry Holland remarks,[129] in old age life approaches to the state of a dream.
The other source of what may, by analogy with the hallucinations of sense, be called the peripherally originating spectra of memory is waking imagination. In certain morbid conditions of mind, and in the case of the few healthy minds endowed with special imaginative force, the products of this mental activity, may, as we saw when dealing with illusions of perception, closely resemble dreams in their vividness and apparent actuality. When this is the case, illusions of memory may arise at once just as in the case of dreams. This will happen more easily when the imagination has for some time been occupied with the same group of ideal scenes, persons, or events. To Dickens, as is well known, his fictitious characters were for the time realities, and after he had finished his story their forms and their doings lingered with him, assuming the aspect of personal recollections. So, too, the energetic activity of imagination which accompanies a deep and absorbing sympathy with another's painful experiences, may easily result in so vivid a realization of all their details as to leave an after-sense of personal suffering. All highly sympathetic persons who have closely accompanied beloved friends through a great sorrow have known something of this subsequent feeling.
The close connection and continuity between normal and abnormal states of mind is illustrated in the fact that in insanity the illusion of taking past imaginations for past realities becomes far more powerful and persistent. Abercrombie (Intellectual Powers, Part III. sec. iv. § 2, "Insanity") speaks of "visions of the imagination which have formerly been indulged in of that kind which we call waking dreams or castle-building recurring to the mind in this condition, and now believed to have a real existence." Thus, for example, one patient believed in the reality of the good luck previously predicted by a fortune-teller. Other writers on mental disease observe that it is a common thing for the monomaniac to cherish the delusion that he has actually gained the object of some previous ambition, or is undergoing some previously dreaded calamity.
Nor is it necessary to these illusions of memory that there should be any exceptional force of imagination. A fairly vivid representation to ourselves of anything, whether real or fictitious, communicated by others, will often result in something very like a personal recollection. In the case of works of history and fiction, which adopt the narrative tense, this tendency to a subsequent illusion of memory is strengthened by the disposition of the mind at the moment of reading to project itself backwards as in an act of recollection. This is a point which will be further dealt with in the next chapter.
In most cases, however, illusions of memory growing out of previous activities of the imagination appear only after the lapse of some time, when in the natural course of things the mental images derived from actual experience would sink to a certain degree of faintness. Habitual novel-readers often catch themselves mistaking the echo of some passage in a good story for the trace left by an actual event. A person's name, a striking saying, and even an event itself, when we first come across it or experience it, may for a moment seem familiar to us, and to recall some past like impression, if it only happens to resemble something in the works of a favourite novelist. And so, too, any recital of another's experience, whether oral or literary, if it deeply interests us and awakens a specially vivid imagination of the events described, may easily become the starting-point of an illusory recollection.
Children are in the habit of "drinking in" with their vigorous and eager imaginations what is told them and read to them, and hence they are specially likely to fall into this kind of error. Not only so: when they grow up and their early recollections lose their definiteness, becoming a few fragments saved from a lost past, it must pretty certainly happen that if any ideas derived from these recitals are preserved, they will simulate the form of memories. Thus, I have often caught myself for a moment under the sway of the illusion that I actually visited the Exhibition of 1851, the reason being that I am able to recall the descriptions given to me of it by my friends, and the excitement attending their journey to London on the occasion. It is to be added that repetition of the act of imagination will tend still further to deepen the subsequent feeling that we are recollecting something. As Hartley well observes, a man, by repeating a story, easily comes to suppose that he remembers it.[130]
Here, then, we have another source of error that we must take into account in judging of the authenticity of an autobiographical narration of the events of childhood. The more imaginative the writer, the greater the risk of illusion from this source as well as from that of dream-fancies. It is highly probable, indeed, that in such full and explicit records of very early life as those given by Rousseau, by Goethe, or by De Quincey, some part of the quasi-narrative is based on mental images which come floating down the stream of time, not from the substantial world of the writer's personal experience, but from the airy region of dream-land or of waking fancy.
It is to be added that even when the quasi-recollection does answer to a real event of childish history, it may still be an illusion. The fact that others, in narrating events to us, are able to awaken imaginations that afterwards appear as past realities, suggests that much of our supposed early recollection owes its existence to what our parents and friends have from time to time told us respecting the first stages of our history.[131] We see, then, how much uncertainty attaches to all autobiographical description of very early life.
Modern science suggests another possible source of these distinct spectra of memory. May it not happen that, by the law of hereditary transmission, which is now being applied to mental as well as bodily phenomena, ancestral experiences will now and then reflect themselves in our mental life, and so give rise to apparently personal recollections? No one can say that this is not so. When the infant first steadies his eyes on a human face, it may, for aught we know, experience a feeling akin to that described above, when through a survival of dream-fancy we take some new scene to be already familiar. At the age when new emotions rapidly develop themselves, when our hearts are full of wild romantic aspirations, do there not seem to blend with the eager passion of the time deep resonances of a vast and mysterious past, and may not this feeling be a sort of reminiscence of prenatal, that is, ancestral experience?
This idea is certainly a fascinating one, worthy to be a new scientific support for the beautiful thought of Plato and of Wordsworth. But in our present state of knowledge, any reasoning on this supposition would probably appear too fanciful. Some day we may find out how much ancestral experience is capable of bequeathing in this way, whether simply shadowy, undefinable mental tendencies, or something like definite concrete ideas. If, for example, it were found that a child that was descended from a line of seafaring ancestors, and that had never itself seen or heard of the "dark-gleaming sea," manifested a feeling of recognition when first beholding it, we might be pretty sure that such a thing as recollection of prenatal events does take place. But till we have such facts, it seems better to refer the "shadowy recollections" to sources which fall within the individual's own experience.
We may now pass to those hallucinations of memory which are analogous to the centrally excited hallucinations of sense-perception. As I have observed, these are necessarily vague and imperfectly developed.
I have already had occasion to touch on the fact of the vast amount of our forgotten experience. And I observed that forgetfulness was a common negative condition of mnemonic illusion. I have now to complete this statement by the observation that total forgetfulness of any period or stage of our past experience necessarily tends to a vague kind of hallucination. In looking back on the past, we see no absolute gaps in the continuity of our conscious life; our image of this past is essentially one of an unbroken series of conscious experiences. But if through forgetfulness a part of the series is effaced from memory, how, it may be asked, is it possible to construct this perfectly continuous line? The answer is that we fill up such lacunæ vaguely by help of some very imperfectly imagined common type of conscious experience. Just as the eye sees no gap in its field of vision corresponding to the "blind spot" of the retina, but carries its impression over this area, so memory sees no lacuna in the past, but carries its image of conscious life over each of the forgotten spaces.
Sometimes this process of filling in gaps in the past becomes more complete. Thus, for example, in recalling a particular night a week or so ago, I instinctively represent it to myself as so many hours of lying in bed with the waking sensations appropriate to the circumstances, as those of bodily warmth and rest, and of the surrounding silence and darkness.
It is apparent that I cannot conceive myself apart from some mode of conscious experience. In thinking of myself in any part of the past or future in which there is actually no consciousness, or of which the conscious content is quite unknown to me, I necessarily imagine myself as consciously experiencing something. If I picture myself under any definitely conceived circumstances, I irresistibly import into my mental image the feelings appropriate to these surroundings. In this way, people tend to imagine themselves after death as lying in the grave, feeling its darkness and its chilliness. If the circumstances of the time are not distinctly represented, the conception of the conscious experience which constitutes that piece of the ego is necessarily vague, and seems generally to resolve itself into a representation of ourselves as dimly self-conscious. What this consciousness of self consists of is a point that will be taken up presently.
Illusions with respect to Personal Identity.
It would seem to follow from these errors in imaginatively filling up our past life, that our consciousness of personal identity is by no means the simple and exact process which it is commonly supposed to be. I have already remarked that the very fact of there being so large a region of the irrevocable in our past experience proves our consciousness of personal continuity to be largely a matter of inference, or of imaginative conjecture, and not simply of immediate recollection. Indeed, it may be said that our power of ignoring whole regions of the past and of leaping complacently over huge gaps in our memory and linking on conscious experience with conscious experience, involves an illusory sense of continuity, and so far of personal identity. Thus, our ordinary image of our past life, if only by omitting the very large fraction passed in sleep, in at least an approximately unconscious state, clearly contains an ingredient of illusion.[132]
It is to be added that the numerous falsifications of our past history, which our retrospective imagination is capable of perpetrating, make our representation of ourselves at different moments and in different stages of our past history to a considerable extent illusory. Thus, though to mistake a past dream-experience for a waking one may not be to lose or confuse the sense of identity, since our dreams are, after all, a part of our experience, yet to imagine that we have ourselves seen what we have only heard from another or read is clearly to confuse the boundaries of our identity. And with respect to longer sections of our history, it is plain that when we wrongly assimilate our remote to our present self, and clothe our childish nature with the feelings and the ideas of our adult life, we identify ourselves overmuch. In this way, through the corruption of our memory, a kind of sham self gets mixed up with the real self, so that we cannot, strictly speaking, be sure that when we project a mnemonic image into the remote past we are not really running away from our true personality.
So far I have been touching only on slight errors in the recognition of that identical self which is represented as persisting through all the fluctuations of conscious life. Other and grosser illusions connected with personal identity are also found to be closely related to defects or disturbances of the ordinary mnemonic process, and so can be best treated here. In order to understand these, we must inquire a little into the nature of our idea and consciousness of a persistent self. Here, again, I would remind the reader that I am treating the point only so far as it can be treated scientifically or empirically, that is to say, by examining what concrete facts or data of experience are taken up into the idea of self. I do not wish to foreclose the philosophic question whether anything more than this empirical content is involved in the conception.
My idea of myself as persisting appears to be built up of certain similarities in the succession of my experiences. Thus, my permanent self consists, on the bodily side, of a continually renewable perception of my own organism, which perception is mainly visual and tactual, and which remains pretty constant within certain limits of time. With this objective similarity is closely conjoined a subjective similarity. Thus, the same sensibilities continue to characterize the various parts of my organism. Similarly, there are the higher intellectual, emotional, and moral peculiarities and dispositions. My idea of my persistent self is essentially a collective image representing a relatively unchanging material object, endowed with unchanging sensibilities and forming a kind of support for permanent higher mental attributes.
The construction of this idea of an enduring unchanging ego is rendered very much easier by the fact that certain concrete feelings are approximately constant elements in our mental life. Among these must be ranked first that dimly discriminated mass of organic sensation which in average states of health is fairly constant, and which stands in sharp contrast to the fluctuating external sensations. These feelings enter into and profoundly colour each person's mental image of himself. In addition to this, there are the frequently recurring higher feelings, the dominant passions and ideas which approximate more or less closely to constant factors of our conscious experience.
This total image of the ego becomes defined and rendered precise by a number of distinctions, as that between my own body or that particular material object with which are intimately united all my feelings, and other material objects in general; then between my organism and other human organisms, with which I learn to connect certain feelings answering to my own, but only faintly represented instead of actually realized feelings. To these prime distinctions are added others, hardly less fundamental, as those between my individual bodily appearance and that of other living bodies, between my personal and characteristic modes of feeling and thinking and those of others, and so on.
Our sense of personal identity may be said to be rooted in that special side of the mnemonic process which consists in the linking of all sequent events together by means of a thread of common consciousness. It is closely connected with that smooth, gliding movement of imagination which appears to involve some more or less distinct consciousness of the uniting thread of similarity. And so long as this movement is possible, so long, that is to say, as retrospective imagination detects the common element, which we may specifically call the recurring consciousness of self, so long is there the undisturbed assurance of personal identity. Nay, more, even when such a recognition might seem to be difficult, if not impossible, as in linking together the very unlike selves, viewed both on their objective and subjective sides, of childhood, youth, and mature life, the mind manages, as we have seen, to feign to itself a sufficient amount of such similarity.
But this process of linking stage to stage, of discerning the common or the recurring amid the changing and the evanescent, has its limits. Every great and sudden change in our experience tends, momentarily at least, to hinder the smooth reflux of imagination. It makes too sharp a break in our conscious life, so that imagination is incapable of spanning the gap and realizing the then and the now as parts of a connected continuous tissue.[133]
These changes may be either objective or subjective. Any sudden alteration of our bodily appearance sensibly impedes the movement of imagination. A patient after a fever, when he first looks in the glass, exclaims, "I don't know myself." More commonly the bodily changes which affect the consciousness of an enduring self are such as involve considerable alterations of cœnæsthesis, or the mass of stable organic sensation. Thus, the loss of a limb, by cutting off a portion of the old sensations through which the organism may be said to be immediately felt, and by introducing new and unfamiliar feelings, will distinctly give a shock to our consciousness of self.
Purely subjective changes, too, or, to speak correctly, such as are known subjectively only, will suffice to disturb the sense of personal unity. Any great moral shock, involving something like a revolution in our recurring emotional experience, seems at the moment to rupture the bond of identity. And even some time after, as I have already remarked, such cataclysms in our mental geology lead to the imaginative thrusting of the old personality away from the new one under the form of a "dead self."[134]
We see, then, that the failure of our ordinary assurance of personal identity is due to the recognition of difference without similarity. It arises from an act of memory—for the mind must still be able to recall the past, dimly at least—but from a memory which misses its habitual support in a recognized element of constancy. If there is no memory, that is to say, if the past is a complete blank, the mind simply feels a rupture of identity without any transformation of self. This is our condition on awaking from a perfectly forgotten period of sleep, or from a perfectly unconscious state (if such is possible) when induced by anæsthetics. Such gaps are, as we have seen, easily filled up, and the sense of identity restored by a kind of retrospective "skipping." On the other hand, the confusion which arises from too great and violent a transformation of our remembered experiences is much less easily corrected. As long as the recollection of the old feelings remains, and with this the sense of violent contrast between the old and the new ones, so long will the illusion of two sundered selves tend to recur.
The full development of this process of imaginative fission or cleavage of self is to be met with in mental disease. The beginnings of such disease, accompanied as they commonly are with disturbances of bodily sensations and the recurring emotions, illustrate in a very interesting way the dependence of the recognition of self on a certain degree of uniformity in the contents of consciousness. The patient, when first aware of these changes, is perplexed, and often regards the new feelings as making up another self, a foreign Tu, as distinguished from the familiar Ego. And sometimes he expresses the relation between the old and the new self in fantastic ways, as when he imagines the former to be under the power of some foreign personality.
When the change is complete, the patient is apt to think of his former self as detached from his present, and of his previous life as a kind of unreal dream; and this fading away of the past into shadowy unreal forms has, as its result, a curious aberration in the sense of time. Thus, it is said that a patient, after being in an asylum only one day, will declare that he has been there a year, five years, and even ten years.[135] This confusion as to self naturally becomes the starting-point of illusions of perception; the transformation of self seeming to require as its logical correlative (for there is a crude logic even in mental disease) a transformation of the environment. When the disease is fully developed under the particular form of monomania, the recollection of the former normal self commonly disappears altogether, or fades away into a dim image of some perfectly separate personality. A new ego is now fully substituted for the old. In other and more violent forms of disease (dementia) the power of connecting the past and present may disappear altogether, and nothing but the disjecta membra of an ego remain.
Enough has, perhaps, been said to show how much of uncertainty and of self-deception enters into the processes of memory. This much-esteemed faculty, valuable and indispensable though it certainly is, can clearly lay no claim to that absolute infallibility which is sometimes said to belong to it. Our individual recollection, left to itself, is liable to a number of illusions even with regard to fairly recent events, and in the case of remote ones it may be said to err habitually and uniformly in a greater or less degree. To speak plainly, we can never be certain on the ground of our personal recollection alone that a distant event happened exactly in the way and at the time that we suppose. Nor does there seem to be any simple way by mere reflection on the contents of our memory of distinguishing what kinds of recollection are likely to be illusory.
How, then, it may be asked, can we ever be certain that we are faithfully recalling the actual events of the past? Given a fairly good, that is, a cultivated memory, it may be said that in the case of very recent events a man may feel certain that, when the conditions of careful attention at the time to what really happened were present, a distinct recollection is substantially correct. Also it is obvious that with respect to all repeated experiences our memories afford practically safe guides. When memory becomes the basis of some item of generalized knowledge, as, for example, of the truth that the pain of indigestion has followed a too copious indulgence in rich food, there is little room for an error of memory properly so called. On the other hand, when an event is not repeated in our experience, but forms a unique link in our personal history, the chances of error increase with the distance of the event; and here the best of us will do well to have resort to a process of verification or, if necessary, of correction.
In order thus to verify the utterances of memory, we must look beyond our own internal mental states to some external facts. Thus, the recollections of our early life may often be tested by letters written by ourselves or our friends at the time, by diaries, and so on. When there is no unerring objective record to be found, we may have recourse to the less satisfactory method of comparing our recollections with those of others. By so doing we may reach a rough average recollection which shall at least be free from any individual error corresponding to that of personal equation in perception. But even thus we cannot be sure of eliminating all error, since there may be a cause of illusion acting on all our minds alike, as, for example, the extraordinary nature of the occurrence, which would pretty certainly lead to a common exaggeration of its magnitude, etc., and since, moreover, this process of comparing recollections affords an opportunity for that reading back a present preconception into the past to which reference has already been made.
The result of our inquiry is less alarming than it looks at first sight. Knowledge is valuable for action, and error is chiefly hurtful in so far as it misdirects conduct. Now, in a general way, we do not need to act upon a recollection of single remote events; our conduct is sufficiently shaped by an accurate recollection of single recent events, together with those bundles of recollections of recurring events and sequences of events which constitute our knowledge of ourselves and our common knowledge of the world about us. Nature has done commendably well in endowing us with the means of cultivating our memories up to this point, and we ought not to blame her for not giving us powers which would only very rarely prove of any appreciable practical service to us.
NOTE.
MOMENTARY ILLUSIONS OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS.
The account of the apparent ruptures in our personal identity given in this chapter may help us to understand the strange tendency to confuse self with other objects which occasionally appears in waking consciousness and in dreams. These errors may be said generally to be due to the breaking up of the composite image of self into its fragments, and the regarding of certain of these only. 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. In other words, when we thus momentarily "lose ourselves," or merge our own existence in that of another object, we clearly let drop out of sight the visual representation of our own individual organism. On the other hand, when in dreams we double our personality, or represent to ourselves an external self which becomes the object of visual perception, it is probably because we isolate in imagination the objective aspect of our personality from the other and subjective aspect. It is not at all unlikely that the several confusions of self touched on in this chapter have had something to do with the genesis of the various historical theories of a transformed existence, as, for example, the celebrated doctrine of metempsychosis.
CHAPTER XI.
ILLUSIONS OF BELIEF.
Our knowledge is commonly said to consist of two large varieties—Presentative and Representative. Representative knowledge, again, falls into two chief divisions. The first of these is Memory, which, though not primary or original, like presentative knowledge, is still regarded as directly or intuitively certain. The second division consists of all other representative knowledge besides memory, including, among other varieties, our anticipations of the future, our knowledge of others' past experience, and our general knowledge about things. There is no one term which exactly hits off this large sphere of cognition: I propose to call it Belief. I am aware that this is by no means a perfect word for my purpose, since, on the one hand, it suggests that every form of this knowledge must be less certain than presentative or mnemonic knowledge, which cannot be assumed; and since, on the other hand, the word is so useful a one in psychology, for the purpose of marking off the subjective fact of assurance in all kinds of cognition. Nevertheless, I know not what better one I could select in order to make my classification answer as closely as a scientific treatment will allow to the deeply fixed distinctions of popular psychology.
It might at first seem as if perception, introspection, and memory must exhaust all that is meant by immediate, or self-evident, knowledge, and as if what I have here called belief must be uniformly mediate, derivate, or inferred knowledge. The apprehension of something now present to the mind, externally or internally, and the reapprehension through the process of memory of what was once so apprehended, might appear to be the whole of what can by any stretch of language be called direct cognition of things. This at least would seem to follow from the empirical theory of knowledge, which regards perception and memory as the ground or logical source of all other forms of knowledge.
And even if we suppose, with some philosophers, that there are certain innate principles of knowledge, it seems now to be generally allowed that these, apart from the particular facts of experience, are merely abstractions; and that they only develop into complete knowledge when they receive some empirical content, which must be supplied either by present perception or by memory. So that in this case, too, all definite concrete knowledge would seem to be either presentative cognition, memory, or, lastly, some mode of inference from these.
A little inquiry into the mental operations which I here include under the name belief will show, however, that they are by no means uniformly process of inference. To take the simplest form of such knowledge, anticipation of some personal experience: this may arise quite apart from recollection, as a spontaneous projection of a mental image into the future. A person may feel "intuitively certain" that something is going to happen to him which does not resemble anything in his past experience. Not only so; even when the expectation corresponds to a bit of past experience, this source of the expectation may, under certain circumstances, be altogether lost to view, and the belief assume a secondarily automatic or intuitive character. Thus, a man may have first entertained a belief in the success of some undertaking as the result of a rough process of inference, but afterwards go on trusting when the grounds for his confidence are wholly lost sight of.
This much may suffice for the present to show that belief sometimes approximates to immediate, or self-evident, conviction. How far this is the case will come out in the course of our inquiry into its different forms. This being so, it will be needful to include in our present study the errors connected with the process of belief in so far as they simulate the immediate instantaneous form of illusion.
What I have here called belief may be roughly distinguished into simple and compound belief. By a simple belief I mean one which has to do with a single event or fact. It includes simple modes of expectation, as well as beliefs in single past facts not guaranteed by memory. A compound belief, on the other hand, has reference to a number of events or facts. Thus, our belief in the continued existence of a particular object, as well as our convictions respecting groups or classes of events, must be regarded as compound, since they can be shown to include a number of simple beliefs.
A. Simple Illusory Belief: Expectation.
It will be well to begin our inquiry by examining the errors connected with simple expectations, so far as these come under our definition of illusion. And here, following our usual practice, we may set out with a very brief account of the nature of the intellectual process in its correct form. For this purpose we shall do well to take a complete or definite anticipation of an event as our type.[136]
The ability of the mind to move forward, forecasting an order of events in time, is clearly very similar to its power of recalling events. Each depends on the capability of imagination to represent a sequence of events or experiences. The difference between the two processes is that in anticipation the imagination setting out from the present traces the succession of experiences in their actual order, and not in the reverse order. It would thus appear to be a more natural and easy process than recollection, and observation bears out this conclusion. Any object present to perception which is associated with antecedents and consequents with the same degree of cohesion, calls up its consequents rather than its antecedents. The spectacle of the rising of the sun carries the mind much more forcibly forwards to the advancing morning than backwards to the receding night. And there is good reason to suppose that in the order of mental development the power of distinctly expecting an event precedes that of distinctly recollecting one. Thus, in the case of the infant mind, as of the animal intelligence, the presence of signs of coming events, as the preparation of food, seems to excite distinct and vivid expectation.[137]
As a mode of assurance, expectation is clearly marked off from memory, and is not explainable by means of this. It is a fundamentally distinct kind of conviction. So far as we are capable of analyzing it, we may say that its peculiarity is its essentially active character. To expect a thing is to have stirred the active impulses, including the powers of attention; it is to be on the alert for it, to have the attention already focussed for it, and to begin to rehearse the actions which the actual happening of the event—for example, the approach of a welcome object—would excite. It thus stands in marked contrast to memory, which is a passive attitude of mind, becoming active only when it gives rise to the expectation of a recurrence of the event.[138]
And now let us pass to the question whether expectation ever takes the form of immediate knowledge. It may, perhaps, be objected that the anticipation of something future cannot be knowledge at all in the sense in which the perception of something present or the recollection of something past is knowledge. But this objection, when examined closely, appears to be frivolous. Because the future fact has not yet come into the sphere of actual existence, it is none the less the object of a perfect assurance.[139]
But, even if it is conceded that expectation is knowledge, the objection may still be urged that it cannot be immediate, since it is the very nature of expectation to ground itself on memory. I have already hinted that this is not the case, and I shall now try to show that what is called expectation covers much that is indistinguishable from immediate intuitive certainty, and consequently offers room for an illusory form of error.
Let us set out with the simplest kind of expectation, the anticipation of something about to happen within the region of our personal experience, and similar to what has happened before. And let the coming of the event be first of all suggested by some present external fact or sign. Suppose, for example, that the sky is heavy, the air sultry, and that I have a bad headache; I confidently anticipate a thunderstorm. It would commonly be said that such an expectation is a kind of inference from the past. I remember that these appearances have been followed by a thunderstorm very often, and I infer that they will in this new case be so followed.
To this, however, it may be replied that in most cases there is no conscious going back to the past at all. As I have already remarked, anticipation is pretty certainly in advance of memory in early life. And even after the habit of passing from the past to the future, from memory to expectation, has been formed, the number of the past repetitions of experience would prevent the mind's clearly reverting to them. And, further, the very force of habit would tend to make the transition from memory to expectation more and more rapid, automatic, and unconscious. Thus it comes about that all distinctly suggested approaching events seem to be expected by a kind of immediate act of belief. The present signs call up the representation of the coming event with all the force of a direct intuition. At least, it may be said that if a process of inference, it is one which has the minimum degree of consciousness.
It might still be urged that the mind passes from the present facts as signs, and so still performs a kind of reasoning process. This is, no doubt, true, and differentiates expectation from perception, in which there is no conscious transition from the presented to the represented. Still I take it that this is only a process of reasoning in so far as the sign is consciously generalized, and this is certainly not true of early expectations, or even of any expectations in a wholly uncultivated mind.
For these reasons I think that any errors involved in such an anticipation may, without much forcing, be brought under our definition of illusion. When due altogether to the immediate force of suggestion in a present object or event, and not involving any conscious transition from past to future, or from general truth to particular instance, these errors appear to me to have more of the character of illusions than of that of fallacies.
Much the same thing may be said about the vivid anticipations of a familiar kind of experience called up by a clear and consecutive verbal suggestion. When a man, even with an apparent air of playfulness, tells me that something is going to happen, and gives a consistent consecutive account of this, I have an anticipation which is not consciously grounded on any past experience of the value of human testimony in general, or of this person's testimony in particular, but which is instantaneous and quasi-immediate. Consequently, any error connected with the mental act approximates to an illusion.
So far I have supposed that the anticipated event is a recurring one, that is to say, a kind of experience which has already become familiar to us. This, however, holds good only of a very few of our experiences. Our life changes as it progresses, both outwardly and inwardly. Many of our anticipations, when first formed, involve much more than a reproduction of a past experience, namely, a complex act of constructive imagination. Our representations of these untried experiences, as, for example, those connected with a new set of circumstances, a new social condition, a new mode of occupation, and so on, are clearly at the first far from simple processes of inference from the past. They are put together by the aid of many fragmentary images, restored by distinct threads of association, yet by a process so rapid as to appear like an intuition. Indeed, the anticipation of such new experiences more often resembles an instantaneous imaginative intuition than a process of conscious transition from old experiences. In the case of these expectations, then, there would clearly seem to be room for illusion from the first.
But even supposing that the errors connected with the first formation of an expectation cannot strictly be called illusory, we may see that such simple expectation will, in certain cases, tend to grow into something quite indistinguishable from illusion. I refer to expectations of remote events which allow of frequent renewal. Even supposing the expectation to have originated from some rational source, as from a conscious inference from past experience, or from the acceptance of somebody's statement, the very habit of cherishing the anticipation tends to invest it with an automatic self-sufficient character. To all intents and purposes the prevision becomes intuitive, by which I mean that the mind is at the time immediately certain that something is going to happen, without needing to fall back on memory or reflection. This being so, whenever the initial process of inference or quasi-inference happens to have been bad, an illusory expectation may arise. In other words, the force of repetition and habit tends to harden what may, in its initial form, have resembled a kind of fallacy into an illusion.
And now let us proceed further. When a permanent expectation is thus formed, there arises the possibility of processes which favour illusion precisely analogous to those which we have studied in the case of memory.
In the first place, the habit of imagining a future event is attended with a considerable amount of illusion as to time or remoteness. After what has been said respecting the conditions of such error in the case of memory, a very few words will suffice here.
It is clear, then, in the first place, that the mind will tend to shorten any period of future time, and so to antedate, so to speak, a given event, in so far as the imagination is able clearly and easily to run over its probable experiences. From this it follows that repeated forecastings of series of events, by facilitating the imaginative process, tend to beget an illusory appearance of contraction in the time anticipated. Moreover, since in anticipation so much of each division of the future time-line is unknown, it is obviously easy for the expectant imagination to skip over long intervals, and so to bring together widely remote events.
In addition to this general error, there are more special errors. As in the case of recollection, vividness of mental image suggests propinquity; and accordingly, all vivid anticipations, to whatever cause the vividness may be owing, whether to powerful suggestion on the part of external objects, to verbal suggestion, or to spontaneous imagination and feeling, are apt to represent their objects as too near.
It follows that an event intensely longed for, in so far as the imagination is busy in representing it, will seem to approach the present. At the same time, as we have seen, an event much longed for commonly appears to be a great while coming, the explanation being that there is a continually renewed contradiction between anticipation and perception. The self-adjustment of the mind in the attitude of expectant attention proves again and again to be vain and futile, and it is this fact which brings home to it the slowness of the sequences of perceived fact, as compared with the rapidity of the sequences of imagination.
When speaking of the retrospective estimate of time, I observed that the apparent distance of an event depends on our representation of the intervening time-segment. And the same remark applies to the prospective estimate. Thus, an occurrence which we expect to happen next week will seem specially near if we know little or nothing of the contents of the intervening space, for in this case the imagination does not project the experience behind a number of other distinctly represented events.
Finally, it is to be remarked that the prospective appreciation of any duration will tend to err relatively by way of excess, where the time is exceptionally filled out with clearly expected and deeply interesting experiences. To the imagination of the child, a holiday, filled with new experiences, appears to be boundless.
Thus far I have assumed that the date of the future event is a matter which might be known. It is, however, obvious, from the very nature of knowledge with respect to the future, that we may sometimes be certain of a thing happening to us without knowing with any degree of definiteness when it will happen. In the case of these temporally undefined expectations, the law already expounded holds good that all vividness of representation tends to lend the things represented an appearance of approaching events. On the other hand, there are some events, such as our own death, which our instinctive feelings tend to banish to a region so remote as hardly to be realized at all.
So much with respect to errors in the localizing of future events.
In the second place, a habit of imagining a future event or group of events will give play to those forces which tend to transform a mental image. In other words, the habitual indulgence of a certain anticipation tends to an illusory view, not only of the "when?" but also of the "how?" of the future event. These transformations, due to subtle processes of emotion and intellect, and reflecting the present habits of these, exactly resemble those by which a remembered event becomes gradually transformed. Thus, we carry on our present habits of thought and feeling into the remote future, foolishly imagining that at a distant period of life, or in greatly altered circumstances, we shall desire and aim at the same things as now in our existing circumstances. In close connection with this forward projection of our present selves, there betrays itself a tendency to look on future events as answering to our present desires and aspirations. In this way, we are wont to soften, beautify, and idealize the future, marking it off from the hard matter-of-fact present.
The less like the future experience to our past experience, or the more remote the time anticipated, the greater the scope for such imaginative transformation. And from this stage of fanciful transformation of a future reality to the complete imaginative creation of such a reality, the step is but a small one. Here we reach the full development of illusory expectation, that which corresponds to hallucination in the region of sense-perception.
In order to understand these extreme forms of illusory expectation, it will be necessary to say something more about the relation of imagination to anticipation in general. There are, I conceive, good reasons for saying that any kind of vivid imagination tends to pass into a semblance of an expectation of a coming personal experience, or an event that is about to happen within the sphere of our own observation. It has long been recognized by writers, among whom I may mention Dugald Stewart, that to distinctly imagine an event or object is to feel for the moment a degree of belief in the corresponding reality. Now, I have already said that expectation is probably a more natural and an earlier developed state of mind than memory. And so it seems probable that any mental image which happens to take hold on the mind, if not recognized as one of memory, or as corresponding to a fact in somebody else's experience, naturally assumes the form of an expectation of a personal experience. The force of the expectation will vary in general as the vividness and persistence of the mental image. Moreover, it follows, from what has been said, that this force of imagination will determine what little time-character we ever give to these wholly ungrounded illusions.
We see, then, that any process of spontaneous imagination will tend to beget some degree of illusory expectation. And among the agencies by which such ungrounded imagination arises, the promptings of feeling play the most conspicuous part. A present emotional excitement may give to an imaginative anticipation, such as that of the prophetic enthusiast, a reality which approximates to that of an actually perceived object. And even where this force of excitement is wanting, a gentle impulse of feeling may suffice to beget an assurance of a distant reality. The unknown recesses of the remote future offer, indeed, the field in which the illusory impulses of our emotional nature have their richest harvest.
"Thus, from afar, each dim discover'd scene
More pleasing seems than all the past hath been;
And every form, that Fancy can repair
From dark oblivion, glows divinely there."
The recurring emotions, the ruling aspirations, find objects for themselves in this veiled region. Feelings too shy to burst forth in unseemly anticipation of the immediate future, modestly satisfy themselves with this remote prospect of satisfaction. And thus, there arises the half-touching, half-amusing spectacle of men and women continually renewing illusory hopes, and continually pushing the date of their realization further on as time progresses and brings no actual fruition.
So far I have spoken of such expectations as refer to future personal experience only. Growing individual experience and the enlargement of this by the addition of social experience enable us to frame a number of other beliefs more or less similar to the simple expectations just dealt with. Thus, for example, I can forecast with confidence events which will occur in the lives of others, and which I shall not even witness; or again, I may even succeed in dimly descrying events, such as political changes or scientific discoveries, which will happen after my personal experience is at an end. Once more, I can believe in something going on now at some distant and even inaccessible point of the universe, and this appears to involve a conditional expectation, and to mean that I am certain that I or anybody else would see the phenomenon, if we could at this moment be transported to the spot.
All such previsions are supposed to be formed by a process of inference from personal experience, including the trustworthiness of testimony. Even allowing, however, that this was so in the first stages of the belief, it is plain that, by dint of frequent renewal, the expectation would soon cease to be a process of inference, and acquire an apparently self-evident character. This being so, if the expectation is not adequately grounded to start with, it is very likely to develop into an illusion. And it is to be added that these permanent anticipations may have their origin much more in our own wishes or emotional promptings than in fact and experience. The mind undisciplined by scientific training is wont to entertain numerous beliefs of this sort respecting what is now going on in unvisited parts of the world, or what will happen hereafter in the distant future. The remote, and therefore obscure, in space and in time has always been the favourite region for the projection of pleasant fancies.
Once more, besides these oblique kinds of expectation, I may form other seemingly simple beliefs, to which the term expectation seems less clearly applicable. Thus, on waking in the morning and finding the ground covered with snow, my imagination moves backwards, as in the process of memory, and realizes the spectacle of the softly falling snow-flakes in the hours of the night. The oral communication of others' experience, including the traditions of the race, enables me to set out from any present point of time, and reconstruct complex chains of experience of vast length lying beyond the bounds of my own personal recollection.
I need not here discuss what the exact nature of such beliefs is. J.S. Mill identifies them with expectations. Thus, according to him, my belief in the nocturnal snowstorm is the assurance that I should have seen it had I waited up during the night. So my belief in Cicero's oratory resolves itself into the conviction that I should have heard Cicero under certain conditions of time and place, which is identical with my expectation that I shall hear a certain speaker to-morrow if I go to the House of Commons.[140] However this be, the thing to note is that such retrospective beliefs, when once formed, tend to approximate in character to recollections. This is true even of new beliefs in recent events directly made known by present objective consequences or signs, as the snowstorm. For in this case there is commonly no conscious comparison of the present signs with previously known signs, but merely a direct quasi-mnemonic passage of mind from the present fact to its antecedent. And it is still more true of long-entertained retrospective beliefs. When, for example, the original grounds of an historical hypothesis are lost sight of, and after the belief has hardened and solidified by time, it comes to look much more like a recollection than an expectation. As a matter of fact, we have seen, when studying the illusions of memory, that our personal experience does become confused with that of others. And one may say that all long-cherished retrospective beliefs tend to become assimilated to recollections.
Here then, again, there seems to be room for illusion to arise. Even in the case of a recent past event, directly made known by present objective signs, the mind is liable to err just as in the case of forecasting an immediately approaching event. And such error has all the force of an illusion: its contradiction is almost as great a shock as that of a recollection. When, for example, I enter my house, and see a friend's card lying on the table, I so vividly represent to myself the recent call of my friend, that when I learn the card is an old one which has accidentally been put on the table, I experience a sense of disillusion very similar to that which attends a contradicted perception. The early crude stages of physical science abundantly illustrate the genesis of such illusions.
It may be added that if there be any feeling present in the mind at the time, the barest suggestion of something having happened will suffice to produce the immediate assurance. Thus, an angry person is apt to hastily accuse another of having done certain things on next to no evidence. The love of the marvellous seems to have played a conspicuous part in building up and sustaining the fanciful hypotheses which mark the dawn of physical science.
Verbal suggestion is a common mode of producing this semblance of a recollected event. By means of the narrative style, it vividly suggests the idea that the events described belong to the past, and excites the imagination to a retrospective construction of them as though they were remembered events. Hence the power of works of fiction on the ordinary mind. Even when there is no approach to an illusion of perception, or to one of memory in the strict sense, the reading of a work of fiction begets at the moment a retrospective belief that has a certain resemblance to a recollection.
All such illusions as those just illustrated, if not afterwards corrected, tend to harden into yet more distinctly "intuitive" errors. Thus, for example, one of the crude geological hypotheses, of which Sir Charles Lyell tells us,[141] would, by the mere fact of being kept before the mind, tend to petrify into a hard fixed belief. And this process of hardening is seen strikingly illustrated in the case of traditional errors, especially when these fall in with our own emotional propensities. Our habitual representations of the remote historical past are liable to much the same kind of error as our recollections of early personal experience. The wrong statements of others and the promptings of our own fancies may lead in the first instance to a filling up of the remote past with purely imaginary shapes. Afterwards the particular origin of the belief is forgotten, and the assurance assumes the aspect of a perfectly intuitive conviction. The hoary traditional myths respecting the golden age, and so on, and the persistent errors of historians under the sway of a strong emotional bias, illustrate such illusions.
So much as to simple illusions of belief, or such as involve single representations only. Let us now pass to compound illusions, which involve a complex group of representations.
B. Compound Illusory Belief.
A familiar example of a compound belief is the belief in a permanent or persistent individual object of a certain character. Such an idea, whatever its whole meaning may be—and this is a disputed point in philosophy—certainly seems to include a number of particular representations, corresponding to direct personal recollections, to the recollections of others, and to numerous anticipations of ourselves and of others. And if the object be a living creature endowed with feelings, our idea of it will contain, in addition to these represented perceptions of ourselves or of others, a series of represented insights, namely, such as correspond to the inner experience of the being, so far as this is known or imagined.
It would thus seem that the idea which we habitually carry about with us respecting a complex individual object is a very composite idea. In order to see this more fully, let us inquire into what is meant by our belief in a person. My idea of a particular friend contains, among other things, numbers of vague representations of his habitual modes of feeling and acting, and numbers of still more vague expectations of how he will or might feel and act in certain circumstances.
Now, it is plain that such a composite idea must have been a very slow growth, involving, in certain stages of its formation, numerous processes of inference or quasi-inference from the past to the future. But in process of time these elements fuse inseparably: the directly known and the inferred no longer stand apart in my mind; my whole conception of the individual as he has been, is, and will be, seems one indivisible cognition; and this cognition is so firmly fixed and presents itself so instantaneously to the mind when I think of the object, that it has all the appearance of an intuitive conviction.
If this is a fairly accurate description of the structure of these compound representations and of their attendant beliefs, it is easy to see how many openings for error they cover. To begin with, my representation of so complex a thing as a concrete personality must always be exceedingly inadequate and fragmentary. I see only a few facets of the person's many-sided mind and character. And yet, in general, I am not aware of this, but habitually identify my representation with the totality of the object.
More than this, a little attention to the process by which these compound beliefs arise will disclose the fact that this apparently adequate representation of another has arisen in part by other than logical processes. If the blending of memory and expectation were simply a mingling of facts with correct inferences from these, it might not greatly matter; but it is something very different from this. Not only has our direct observation of the person been very limited, even that which we have been able to see has not been perfectly mirrored in our memory. It has already been remarked that recollection is a selective process, and this truth is strikingly illustrated in the growth of our enduring representations of things. What stamps itself on my memory is what surprised me or what deeply interested me at the moment. And then there are all the risks of mnemonic illusion to be taken into account as well. Thus, my idea of a person, so far even as it is built up on a basis of direct personal recollection, is essentially a fragmentary and to some extent a misleading representation.
Nor is this all. My habitual idea of a person is a resultant of forces of memory conjoined with other forces. Among these are to be reckoned the influence of illusory perception or insight, my own and that of others. The amount of misinterpretation of the words and actions of a single human being during the course of a long acquaintance must be very considerable. To these must be added the effect of erroneous single expectations and reconstructions of past experiences, in so far as these have not been distinctly contradicted and dissipated. All these errors, connected with single acts of observing or inferring the feelings and doings of another, have their effect in distorting the subsequent total representation of the person.
Finally, we must include a more distinct ingredient of active illusion, namely, all the complex effects of the activity of imagination as led, not by fact and experience, but by feeling and desire. Our permanent idea of another reflects all that we have fondly imagined the person capable of doing, and thus is made up of an ideal as well as a real actually known personality. And this result of spontaneous imagination must be taken to include the ideals entertained by others who are likely to have influenced us by their beliefs.[142]
Enough has probably been said to show how immensely improbable it is that our permanent cognition of so complex an object as a particular human being should be at all an accurate representation of the reality, how much of the erroneous is certain to get mixed up with the true. And this being so, we may say that our apparently simple direct cognition of a given person, our assurance of what he is and will continue to be, is to some extent illusory.
Illusion of Self-Esteem.
Let us now pass to another case of compound representation, where the illusory element is still more striking. I refer to the idea of self which each of us habitually carries about with him. Every man's opinion of himself, as a whole, is a very complex mental product, in which facts known by introspection no doubt play a part, but probably only a very subordinate part. It is obvious, from what has been said about the structure of our habitual representations of other individuals, that our ordinary representation of ourselves will be tinged with that mass of error which we have found to be connected with single acts of introspection, recollections of past personal experience, and illusory single expectations of future personal experiences. How large an opening for erroneous conviction here presents itself can only be understood by a reference to certain deeply fixed impulses and feelings connected with, the very consciousness of self, and favouring what I have marked off as active illusion. I shall try to show very briefly that each man's intuitive persuasion of his own powers, gifts, or importance—in brief, of his own particular value, contains, from the first, a palpable ingredient of active illusion.
Most persons, one supposes, have with more or less distinct consciousness framed a notion of their own value, if not to the world generally, at least to themselves. And this notion, however undefined it may be, is held to with a singular tenacity of belief. The greater part of mankind, indeed, seem never to entertain the question whether they really possess points of excellence. They assume it as a matter perfectly self-evident, and appear to believe in their vaguely conceived worth on the same immediate testimony of consciousness by which they assure themselves of their personal existence. Indeed, the conviction of personal consequence may be said to be a constant factor in most men's consciousness. However restrained by the rules of polite intercourse, it betrays its existence and its energy in innumerable ways. It displays itself most triumphantly when the mind is suddenly isolated from other minds, when other men unite in heaping neglect and contempt on the believer's head. In these moments he proves an almost heroic strength of confidence, believing in himself and in his claims to careful consideration when all his acquaintance are practically avowing their disbelief.
The intensity of this belief in personal value may be observed in very different forms. The young woman who, quite independently of others' opinion, and even in defiance of it, cherishes a conviction that her external attractions have a considerable value; the young man who, in the face of general indifference, persists in his habit of voluble talk on the supposition that he is conferring on his fellow-creatures the fruits of profound wisdom; and the man of years whose opinion of his own social importance and moral worth is quite disproportionate to the estimation which others form of his claims—these alike illustrate the force and pertinacity of the belief.
There are, no doubt, many exceptions to this form of self-appreciation. In certain robust minds, but little given to self-reflection, the idea of personal value rarely occurs. And then there are timid, sensitive natures that betray a tendency to self-distrust of all kinds, and to an undue depreciation of personal merit. Yet even here traces of an impulse to think well of self will appear to the attentive eye, and one can generally recognize that this impulse is only kept down by some other stronger force, as, for example, extreme sensitiveness to the judgment of others, great conscientiousness, and so on. And however this be, it will be allowed that the average man rates himself highly.
It is to be noticed that this persuasion of personal value or excellence is, in common, very vague. A man may have a general sense of his own importance without in the least being able to say wherein exactly his superiority lies. Or, to put it another way, he may have a strong conviction that he stands high in the scale of morally deserving persons, and yet be unable to define his position more nearly. Commonly, the conviction seems to be only definable as an assurance of a superlative of which the positive and comparative are suppressed. At most, his idea of his moral altitude resolves itself into the proposition, "I am a good deal better than Mr. A. or Mr. B." Now, it is plain that in these intuitive judgments on his own excellence, the man is making an assertion with respect, not only to inner subjective feelings which he only can be supposed to know immediately, but also to external objective facts which are patent to others, namely, to certain active tendencies and capabilities, to the direction of external conduct in certain lines.[143] Hence, if the assertion is erroneous, it will be in plain contradiction to others' perceptions of his powers or moral endowments. And this is what we actually find. A man's self-esteem, in a large preponderance of cases, is plainly in excess of others' esteem of him. What the man conceives himself to be differs widely from what others conceive him to be.
"Oh wad some power the giftie gie us,
To see oursels as others see us!"
Now, whence comes this large and approximately uniform discrepancy between our self-esteem and others' esteem of us? By trying to answer this question we shall come to understand still better the processes by which the most powerful forms of illusion are generated.
It is, I think, a matter of every-day observation that children manifest an apparently instinctive disposition to magnify self as soon as the vaguest idea of self is reached. It is very hard to define this feeling more precisely than by terming it a rudimentary sense of personal importance. It may show itself in very different ways, taking now a more active form, as an impulse of self-assertion, and a desire to enforce one's own will to the suppression of others' wills, and at another time wearing the appearance of a passive emotion, an elementary form of amour propre. And it is this feeling which forms the germ of the self-estimation of adults. For in truth all attribution of value involves an element of feeling, as respect, and of active desire, and the ascription of value to one's self is in its simplest form merely the expression of this state of mind.
But how is it, it may be asked, that this feeling shows itself instinctively as soon as the idea of self begins to arise in consciousness? The answer to this question is to be found, I imagine, in the general laws of mental development. All practical judgments like that of self-estimation are based on some feeling which is developed before it; and, again, the feeling itself is based on some instinctive action which, in like manner, is earlier than the feeling. Thus, for example, an Englishman's judgment that his native country is of paramount value springs out of a long-existent sentiment of patriotism, which sentiment again may be regarded as having slowly grown up about the half-blindly followed habit of defending and furthering the interests of one's nation or tribe. In a similar way, one suspects, the feeling of personal worth, with its accompanying judgment, is a product of a long process of instinctive action.
What this action is it is scarcely necessary to remind the reader. Every living organism strives, or acts as if it consciously strove, to maintain its life and promote its well-being. The actions of plants are clearly related to the needs of a prosperous existence, individual first and serial afterwards. The movements of the lower animals have the same end. Thus, on the supposition that man has been slowly evolved from lower forms, it is clear that the instinct of self-promotion must be the deepest and most ineradicable element of his nature, and it is this instinct which directly underlies the rudimentary sentiment of self-esteem of which we are now treating.