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.

This instinct will appear, first of all, as the unreflecting organized habit of seeking individual good, of aiming at individual happiness, and so of pushing on the action of the individual will. This impulse shows itself in distinct form as soon as the individual is brought into competition with another similarly constituted being. It is the force which displays itself in all opposition and hostility, and it tends to limit and counteract the gregarious instincts of the race. In the next place, as intelligence expands, this instinctive action becomes conscious pursuit of an end, and at this stage the thing pursued attracts to itself a sentiment. The individual now consciously desires his own happiness as contrasted with that of others, knowingly aims at enlarging his own sphere of action to the diminution of others' spheres. Here we have the nascent sentiment of self-esteem, on which all later judgments respecting individual importance are, in part at least, founded.

Thus, we see that long before man had arrived at an idea of self there had been growing up an emotional predisposition to think well of self. And in this way we may understand how it is that this sentiment of self-esteem shows itself immediately and instinctively in the child's mind as soon as its unfolding consciousness is strong enough to grasp the first rough idea of personal existence. Far down, so to speak, below the surface of distinct consciousness, in the intricate formation of ganglion-cell and nerve-fibre, the connections between the idea of self and this emotion of esteem have been slowly woven through long ages of animal development.

Here, then, we seem to have the key to the apparently paradoxical fact that a man, with all his superior means of studying his own feelings, commonly esteems himself, in certain respects at least, less accurately than a good external observer would be capable of doing. In forming an opinion of ourselves we are exposed to the full force of a powerful impulse of feeling. This impulse, acting as a bias, enters more or less distinctly into our single acts of introspection, into our attempts to recall our past doings, into our insights into the meaning of others' words and actions as related to ourselves (forming the natural disposition to enjoy flattery), and finally into our wild dreams as to our future achievements. It is thus the principal root of that gigantic illusion of self-conceit, which has long been recognized by practical sense as one of the greatest obstacles to social action; and by art as one of the most ludicrous manifestations of human weakness.

If there are all these openings for error in the beliefs we go on entertaining respecting individual things, including ourselves, there must be a yet larger number of such openings in those still more compound beliefs which we habitually hold respecting collections or classes of things. A single illusion of perception or of memory may suffice to give rise to a wholly illusory belief in a class of objects, for example, ghosts. The superstitious beliefs of mankind abundantly illustrate this complexity of the sources of error. And in the case of our every-day beliefs respecting real classes of objects, these sources contribute a considerable quota of error. We may again see this by examining our ordinary beliefs respecting our fellow-men.

A moment's consideration will show that our prevailing views respecting any section of mankind, say our fellow-countrymen, or mankind at large, correspond at best to a very loose process of reasoning. The accidents of our personal experience and opportunities of observation, the traditions which coloured our first ideas, the influence of our dominant feelings in selecting for attention and retention certain aspects of the complex object, and in idealizing this object,—these sources of passive and active illusion, must, to say the least, have had as much to do with our present solidified and seemingly "intuitive" knowledge as anything that can be called the exercise of individual judgment and reasoning power.

The force of this observation and the proof that such widely generalized beliefs are in part illusory, is seen in the fact that men of unlike experience and unlike temperament form such utterly dissimilar views of the same object. Thus, as Mr. Spencer has shown,[144] in looking at things national there may be not only a powerful patriotic bias at work in the case of the vulgar Philistine, but also a distinctly anti-patriotic bias in the case of the over-fastidious seeker after culture. And I need hardly add that the different estimates of mankind held with equal assurance by the cynic, the misanthropist, and the philanthropic vindicator of his species, illustrate a like diversity of the psychological conditions of belief.

Finally, illusion may enter into that still wider collection of beliefs which make up our ordinary views of life and the world as a whole. Here there reflect themselves in the plainest manner the accidents of our individual experience and the peculiar errors to which our intellectual and emotional conformation disposes us. The world is for us what we feel it to be; and we feel it to be the cause of our particular emotional experience. Just as we have found that our environment helps to determine our idea of self and personal continuity, so, conversely, our inner experience, our remembered or imagined joys and sorrows throw a reflection on the outer world, giving it its degree of worth. Hence the contradictory, and consequently to some extent at least illusory, views of the optimist and the pessimist, "intuitions" which, I have tried to show elsewhere, are connected with deeply rooted habits of feeling, and are antecedent to all reasoned philosophic systems.

If proof were yet wanted that these wide-embracing beliefs may to some extent be illusory, it would be found in the fact that they can be distinctly coloured by a temporary mood or mental tone. As I have more than once had occasion to remark, a feeling when present tends to colour all the ideas of the time. And when out of sorts, moody, and discontented, a man is prone to find a large objective cause of his dissatisfaction in a world out of joint and not moving to his mind.

It is evident that all the permanent beliefs touched on in this chapter must constitute powerful predispositions with respect to any particular act of perception, insight, introspection, or recollection. In other words, these persistent beliefs, so far as individual or personal, are but another name for those fixed habits of mind which, in the case of each one of us, constitute our intellectual bias, and the source of the error known as personal equation. And it may be added that, just as these erroneous beliefs existing in the shape of fixed prejudices constitute a bias to new error, so they act as powerful resisting forces in relation to new truth and the correction of error.

In comparing these illusions of belief with those of perception and memory, we cannot fail to notice their greater compass or range, in other words, the greater extent of the region of fact misrepresented. Even if they are less forcible and irresistible than these errors, they clearly make up for this by the area which they cover.

Another thing to be observed with respect to these comprehensive beliefs is that where, as here, so many co-operant conditions are at work, the whole amount of common objective agreement is greatly reduced. In other words, individual peculiarities of intellectual conformation, emotional temperament, and experience have a far wider scope for their influence in these beliefs than they have in the case of presentative cognitions. At the same time, it is noteworthy that error much more rapidly propagates itself here than in the case of our perceptions or recollections. As we have seen, these beliefs all include much more than the results of the individual's own experience. They offer a large field for the influence of personal ascendency, of the contagion of sympathy, and of authority and tradition. As a consequence of this, the illusions of belief are likely to be far more persistent than those of perception or of memory; for not only do they lose that salutary process of correction which comparison with the experience of others affords, but they may even be strengthened and upheld to some extent by such social influences.

And here the question might seem to obtrude itself, whether, in relation to such a fluctuating mass of belief as that just reviewed, in which there appears to be so little common agreement, we can correctly speak of anything as objectively determinable. If illusion and error as a whole are defined by a reference to what is commonly held true and certain, what, it may be asked, becomes of the so-called illusions of belief?

This question will have to be fully dealt with in the following chapter. Here it may be sufficient to remark that amid all this apparent deviation of belief from a common standard of truth, there is a clear tendency to a rational consensus. Thought, by disengaging what is really matter of permanent and common cognition, both in the individual and still more in the class,[145] and fixing this quantum of common cognition in the shape of accurate definitions and universal propositions, is ever fighting against and restraining the impulses of individual imagination towards dissociation and isolation of belief. And this same process of scientific control of belief is ever tending to correct widespread traditional forms of error, and to erect a new and better standard of common cognition.

This scientific regulation of belief only fails where the experiences which underlie the conceptions are individual, variable, and subjective. Hence there is no definite common conception of the value of life and of the world, just because the estimate of this value must vary with individual circumstances, temperament, etc. All that can be looked for here in the way of a common standard or norm is a rough average estimate. And this common-sense judgment serves practically as a sufficient criterion of truth, at least in relation to such extreme one-sidedness of view as approaches the abnormal, that is to say, one of the two poles of irrational exaltation, or "joy-madness," and abject melancholy, which, appear among the phenomena of mental disease.[146]



CHAPTER XII.

RESULTS.

The foregoing study of illusions may not improbably have had a bewildering effect on the mind of the reader. To keep the mental eye, like the bodily eye, for any time intently fixed on one object is apt to produce a feeling of giddiness. And in the case of a subject like illusion, the effect is enormously increased by the disturbing character of the object looked at. Indeed, the first feeling produced by our survey of the wide field of illusory error might be expressed pretty accurately by the despondent cry of the poet—

"Alas! it is delusion all: The future cheats us from afar, Nor can we be what we recall, Nor dare we think on what we are."

It must be confessed that our study has tended to bring home to the mind the wide range of the illusory and unreal in our intellectual life. In sense-perception, in the introspection of the mind's own feelings, in the reading of others' feelings, in memory, and finally in belief, we have found a large field for illusory cognition. And while illusion has thus so great a depth in the individual mind, it has a no less striking breadth or extent in the collective human mind. No doubt its grosser forms manifest themselves most conspicuously in the undisciplined mind of the savage and the rustic; yet even the cultivated mind is by no means free from its control. In truth, most of the illusions illustrated in this work are such as can be shared in by all classes of mind.

In view of this wide far-reaching area of ascertained error, the mind naturally asks, What are the real limits of illusory cognition, and how can we be ever sure of having got beyond them? This question leads us on to philosophical problems of the greatest consequence, problems which can only be very lightly touched in this place. Before approaching these, let us look back a little more carefully and gather up our results, reflect on the method which we have been unconsciously adopting, and inquire how far this scientific mode of procedure will take us in determining what is the whole range of illusory cognition.

We have found an ingredient of illusion mixed up with all the popularly recognized forms of immediate knowledge. Yet this ingredient is not equally conspicuous in all cases. First of all, illusion varies very considerably in its degree of force and persistence. Thus, in general, a presentative illusion is more coercive than a representative; an apparent reality present to the mind is naturally felt to be more indubitable than one absent and only represented. On the other hand, a representative illusion is often more enduring than a presentative, that is to say, less easily found out. It is to be added that a good deal of illusion is only partial, there being throughout an under-current of rational consciousness, a gentle play of self-criticism, which keeps the error from developing into a perfect self-delusion. This remark applies not only to the innocent illusions of art, but also to many of our every-day illusions, both presentative and representative. In many cases, indeed, as, for example, in looking at a reflection in a mirror, the illusion is very imperfect, remaining in the nascent stage.

Again, a little attention to the facts here brought together will show that the proportion of illusory to real knowledge is far from being the same in each class of immediate or quasi-immediate cognition. Thus, with respect to the great distinction between presentative and representative knowledge, it is to be observed that, in so far as any act of cognition is, strictly speaking, presentative, it does not appear to admit of error. The illusions of perception are connected with the representative side of the process, and are numerous just because this is so extensive. On the other hand, in introspection, where the scope of independent representation is so limited, the amount of illusion is very inconsiderable, and may in practice be disregarded. So again, to take a narrower group of illusions, we find that in the recalling of distant events the proportion of error is vastly greater than in the recalling of near events.

So much as to the extent of illusion as brought to light by our preceding study. Let us now glance at the conclusions obtained respecting its nature and its causes.

Causes of Illusion.

Looking at illusion as a whole, and abstracting from the differences of mental mechanism in the processes of perception, memory, etc., we may say that the rationale or mode of genesis of illusion is very much the same throughout. Speaking broadly, one may describe all knowledge as a correspondence of representation with fact or experience, or as a stable condition of the representation which cannot be disturbed by new experiences. It does not matter, for our present purpose, whether the fact represented is supposed to be directly present, as in presentative cognition; or to be absent, either as something past or future, or finally as a "general fact," that is to say, the group of facts (past and future) embodied in a universal proposition.[147]

In general this accordance between our representations and facts is secured by the laws of our intellectual mechanism. It follows from the principles of association that our simple experiences, external and internal, will tend to reflect themselves in perception, memory, expectation, and general belief, in the very time-connections in which they actually occur. To put it briefly, facts which occur together will in general be represented together, and they will be the more perfectly co-represented in proportion to the frequency of this concurrence.

Illusion, as distinguished from correct knowledge, is, to put it broadly, deviation of representation from fact. This is due in part to limitations and defects in the intellectual mechanism itself, such as the imperfections of the activities of attention, discrimination, and comparison, in relation to what is present. Still more is it due to the control of our mental processes by association and habit. These forces, which are at the very root of intelligence, are also, in a sense, the originators of error. Through the accidents of our experience or the momentary condition of our reproductive power, representations get wrongly grouped with presentations and with one another; wrongly grouped, that is to say, according to a perfect or ideal standard, namely, that the grouping should always exactly agree with the order of experience as a whole, and the force of cohesion be proportionate to the number of the conjunctions of this experience.

This great source of error has been so abundantly illustrated under the head of Passive Illusions that I need not dwell on it further. It is plain that a passive error of perception, or of expectation, is due in general to a defective grouping of elements, to a grouping which answers, perhaps, to the run of the individual's actual experience, but not to a large and complete common experience.[148] Similarly, an illusory general belief is plainly a welding together of elements (here concepts, answering to innumerable representative images) in disagreement with the permanent connections of experience. Even a passive illusion of memory, in so far as it involves a rearrangement of successive representations, shows the same kind of defect.

In the second place, this incorrect grouping maybe due, not to defects in attention and discrimination, combined with insufficiently grounded association, but to the independent play of constructive imagination and the caprices of feeling. This is illustrated in what I have called Active Illusions, whether the excited perceptions and the hallucinations of sense, or the fanciful projections of memory or of expectation. Here we have a force directly opposed to that of experience. Active illusion arises, not through the imperfections of the intellectual mechanism, but through a palpable interference with this mechanism. It is a regrouping of elements which simulates the form of a suggestion by experience, but is, in reality, the outcome of the individual mind's extra-intellectual impulses.

We see, then, that, in spite of obvious differences in the form, the process in all kinds of immediate cognition is fundamentally identical. It is essentially a bringing together of elements, whether similar or dissimilar and associated by a link of contiguity, and a viewing of these as connected parts, of a whole; it is a process of synthesis. And illusion, in all its forms, is bad grouping or carelessly performed synthesis. This holds good even of the simplest kinds of error in which a presentative element is wrongly classed; and it holds good of those more conspicuous errors of perception, memory, expectation, and compound belief, in which representations connect themselves in an order not perfectly answering to the objective order.

This view of the nature and causes of illusion is clearly capable of being expressed in physical language. Bad grouping of psychical elements is equivalent to imperfect co-ordination of their physical, that is to say, nervous, conditions, imperfect in the evolutionist's sense, as not exactly according with external relations. So far as illusions of suggestion (passive illusions) are concerned, the error is connected with organized tendencies, due to a limited action of experience. On the other hand, illusions of preconception (active illusions) usually involve no such deeply fixed or permanent organic connections, but merely a temporary confluence of nerve-processes.[149] The nature of the physical process is best studied in the case of errors of sense-perception. Yet we may hypothetically argue that even in the case of the most complex errors, as those of memory and of belief, there is implied a deviation in the mode of connection of nervous structures (whether the connection be permanent or temporary) from the external order of facts.

And now we are in a position to see whether illusion is ultimately distinguishable from other modes of error, namely, those incident to conscious processes of reasoning. It must have been plain to an attentive reader throughout our exposition that, in spite of our provisional distinction, no sharp line can be drawn between much of what, on the surface, looks like immediate knowledge, and consciously derived or inferred knowledge. On its objective side, reasoning may be roughly defined as a conscious transition of mind from certain facts or relations of facts to other facts or relations recognized as similar. According to this definition, a fallacy would be a hasty, unwarranted transition to new cases not identical with the old. And a good part of immediate knowledge is fundamentally the same, only that here, through the exceptional force of association and habit, the transition is too rapid to be consciously recognized. Consequently, illusion becomes identified at bottom with fallacious inference: it may be briefly described as collapsed inference. Thus, illusory perception and expectation are plainly a hasty transition of mind from old to new, from past to present, conjunctions of experience.[150] And, as we have seen, an illusory general belief owes its existence to a coalescence of representations of known facts or connections with products of imagination which simulate the appearance of inferences from these facts.

In the case of memory, in so far as it is not aided by reasoning from present signs, there seems to be nothing like a movement of inference. It is evident, indeed, that memory is involved in and underlies every such transition of thought. Illusions of memory illustrate rather a process of wrong classing, that is to say, of wrongly identifying the present mental image with past fact, which is the initial step in all inference. In this way they closely resemble those slight errors of perception which are due to erroneous classing of sense-impressions. But since the intellectual process involved in assimilating mental elements is very similar to that implied in assimilating complex groups of such elements, we may say that even in these simple kinds of error there is something which resembles a wrong classing of relations, something, therefore, which approximates in character to a fallacy.

By help of this brief review of the nature and causes of illusion, we see that in general it may be spoken of as deviation of individual from common experience. This applies to passive illusion in so far as it follows from the accidents of individual experience, and it still more obviously applies to active illusion as due to the vagaries of individual feeling and constructive imagination. We might, perhaps, characterize all illusion as partial view, partial both in the sense of being incomplete, and in the other sense of being that to which the mind by its peculiar predispositions inclines. This being so, we may very roughly describe all illusion as abnormal. Just as hallucination, the most signal instance of illusion, is distinctly on the border-land of healthy and unhealthy mental life; just as dreams are in the direction of such unhealthy mental action; so the lesser illusions of memory and so on are abnormal in the sense that they imply a departure from a common typical mode of intellectual action.

It is plain, indeed, that this is the position we have been, taking up throughout our discussion of illusion. We have assumed that what is common and normal is true, or answers to what is objectively real. Thus, in dealing with errors of perception, we took for granted that the common percept—meaning by this what is permanent in the individual and the general experience—is at the same time the true percept. So in discussing the illusions of memory we estimated objective time by the judgment of the average man, free from individual bias, and apart from special circumstances favourable to error. Similarly, in the case of belief, true belief was held to be that which men in general, or in the long run, or on the average, hold true, as distinguished from what the individual under variable and accidental influences holds true. And even in the case of introspection we found that true cognition resolved itself into a consensus or agreement as to certain psychical facts.

Criterion of Illusion.

Now, it behoves us here to examine this assumption, with the view of seeing how far it is perfectly sound. For it may be that what is commonly held true does not in all cases strictly answer to the real, in which case our idea of illusion would have to be extended so as to include certain common beliefs. This question was partly opened up at the close of the last chapter. It will be found that the full discussion of it carries us beyond the scientific point of view altogether. For the present, however, let us see what can be said about it from that standpoint of positive science to which we have hitherto been keeping.

Now, if by common be meant what has been shared by all minds or the majority of minds up to a particular time, a moment's inspection of the process of correcting illusion will show that science assumes the possibility of a common illusion. In the history of discovery, the first assault on an error was the setting up of the individual against the society. The men who first dared to say that the sun did not move round the earth found to their cost what it was to fly in the face of a common, though illusory, perception of the senses.[151]

If, however, by common be understood what is permanently and unshakably held true by men in proportion as their minds become enlightened, then science certainly does assume the truth of common perception and belief. Thus, the progress of the physical sciences may be described as a movement towards a new, higher, and more stable consensus of ideas and beliefs. In point of fact, the truths accepted by men of science already form a body of common belief for those who are supposed by all to have the means of testing the value of their convictions. And the same applies to the successive improvements in the conceptions of the moral sciences, for example, history and psychology. Indeed, the very meaning of science appears to be a body of common cognition to which all minds converge in proportion to their capabilities and opportunities of studying the particular subject-matter concerned.

Not only so, from a strictly scientific point of view it might seem possible to prove that common cognition, as defined above, must in general be true cognition. I refer here to the now familiar method of the evolutionist.

According to this doctrine, which is a scientific method in so far as it investigates the historical developments of mind or the order of mental phenomena in time, cognition may be viewed as a part of the result of the interaction of external agencies and the organism, as an incident of the great process of adaptation, physical and psychical, of organism to environment. In thus looking at cognition, the evolutionist is making the assumption which all science makes, namely, that correct views are correspondences between internal (mental) relations and external (physical) relations, incorrect views disagreements between these relations. From this point of view he may proceed to argue that the intellectual processes must tend to conform to external facts. All correspondence, he tells us, means fitness to external conditions and practical efficiency, all want of correspondence practical incompetence. Consequently, those individuals in whom the correspondence was more complete and exact would have an advantage in the struggle for existence and so tend to be preserved. In this way the process of natural selection, by separately adjusting individual representations to actualities, would make them converge towards a common meeting-point or social standard of true cognition. That is to say, by eliminating or at least greatly circumscribing the region of individual illusion, natural selection would exclude the possibility of a persistent common illusion.

Not only so, the evolutionist may say that this coincidence between common beliefs and true beliefs would be furthered by social as well as individual competition. A community has an advantage in the struggle with other communities when it is distinguished by the presence of the conditions of effective co-operation, such as mutual confidence. Among these conditions a body of true knowledge seems to be of the first importance, since conjoint action always presupposes common beliefs, and, to be effective action, implies that these beliefs are correct. Consequently, it may be argued, the forces at work in the action of man on man, of society on the individual, in the way of assimilating belief, must tend, in the long run, to bring about a coincidence between representations and facts. Thus, in another way, natural selection would help to adjust our ideas to realities, and to exclude the possibility of anything like a permanent common error.

Yet once more, according to Mr. Herbert Spencer, the tendency to agreement between our ideas and the environment would be aided by what he calls the direct process of adaptation. The exercise of a function tends to the development of that function. Thus, our acts of perception must become more exact by mere repetition. So, too, the representations and concepts growing out of perceptions must tend to approximate to external facts by the direct action of the environment on our physical and psychical organism; for external relations which are permanent will, in the long run, stamp themselves on our nervous and mental structure more deeply and indelibly than relations which are variable and accidental.

It would seem, from all this, that so long as we are keeping to the scientific point of view, that is to say, taking for granted that there is something objectively real answering to our perceptions and conceptions, the question of the possibility of a universal or (permanently) common illusion does not arise. Yet a little more reflection will show us that it may arise in a way. So far as the logical sufficiency of the social consensus or common belief is accepted as scientifically proved, it is open to suspicion on strictly scientific grounds. The evolutionist's proof involves one or two assumptions which are not exactly true.

In the first place, it is not strictly correct to say that all illusion involves a practical unfitness to circumstances. At the close of our investigation of particular groups of illusion, for example, those of perception and memory, it was pointed out that many of the errors reviewed were practically harmless, being either momentary and evanescent, or of such a character as not to lead to injurious action. And now, by glancing back over the field of illusion as a whole, we may see the same thing. The day-dreams in which some people are apt to indulge respecting the remote future have little effect on their conduct. So, too, a man's general view of the world is often unrelated to his daily habits of life. It seems to matter exceedingly little, in general, whether a person take up the geocentric or the heliocentric conception of the cosmic structure, or even whether he adopt an optimistic or pessimistic view of life and its capabilities.

So inadequate, indeed, does the agency of natural selection seem to be to eliminate illusion, that it may even be asked whether its tendency may not be sometimes to harden and fix rather than to dissolve and dissipate illusory ideas and beliefs. It will at once occur to the reader that the illusion of self-esteem, discussed in the last chapter, may have been highly useful as subserving individual self-preservation. In a similar way, it has been suggested by Schopenhauer that the illusion of the lover owes its force and historical persistence to its paramount utility for the preservation of the species. And to pass from a recurring individual to a permanently common belief, it is maintained by the same pessimist and his followers that what they regard as the illusion of optimism, namely, the idea that human life as a whole is good, grows out of the individual's irrational love of life, which is only the same instinctive impulse of self-preservation appearing as conscious desire. Once more, it has been suggested that the belief in free-will, even if illusory, would be preserved by the process of evolution, owing to its paramount utility in certain stages of moral development. All this seems to show at least the possibility of a kind of illusion which would tend to perpetuate itself, and to appear as a permanent common belief.

Now, so far as this is the case, so far as illusion is useful or only harmless, natural selection cannot, it is plain, be counted on to weed it out, keeping it within the narrow limits of the exceptional and individual. Natural selection gets rid of what is harmful only, and is indifferent to what is practically harmless.

It may, however, still be said that the process of direct adaptation must tend to establish such a consensus of true belief. Now, I do not wish for a moment to dispute that the growth of intelligence by the continual exercise of its functions tends to such a consensus: this is assumed to be the case by everybody. What I want to point out is that there is no scientific proof of this position.

The correspondence of internal to external relations is obviously limited by the modes of action of the environment on the organism, consequently by the structure of the organism itself. Scientific men are familiar with the idea that there may be forces in the environment which are practically inoperative on the organism, there being no corresponding mode of sensibility. And even if it be said that our present knowledge of the material world, including the doctrine of the conservation of energy, enables us to assert that there is no mode of force wholly unknown to us, it can still be contended that the environment may, for aught we know, be vastly more than the forces of which, owing to the nature of our organism, we know it to be composed. In short, since, on the evolution theory viewed as a scientific doctrine, the real external world does not directly mirror itself in our minds, but only indirectly brings our perceptions and representations into adjustment by bringing into adjustment the nervous organism with which they are somehow connected, it is plain that we cannot be certain of adequately apprehending the external reality which is here assumed to exist.

Science, then, cannot prove, but must assume the coincidence between permanent common intuitions and objective reality. To raise the question whether this coincidence is perfect or imperfect, whether all common intuitions known to be persistent are true or whether there are any that are illusory, is to pass beyond the scientific point of view to another, namely, the philosophic. Thus, our study of illusion naturally carries us on from scientific to philosophic reflection. Let me try to make this still more clear.

Transition to Philosophic View.

All science makes certain assumptions which it never examines. Thus, the physicist assumes that when we experience a sensation we are acted on by some pre-existing external object which is the cause, or at least one condition, of the sensation. While resolving the secondary qualities of light, sound, etc., into modes of motion, while representing the object very differently from the unscientific mind, he agrees with this in holding to the reality of something external, regarding this as antecedent to and therefore as independent of the particular mind which receives the sense-impression. Again, he assumes the uniformity of nature, the universality of the causal relation, and so on.

Similarly, the modern psychologist, when confining himself within the limits of positive science, and treating mind phenomenally or empirically, or, in other words, tracing the order of mental states in time and assigning their conditions, takes for granted much the same as physical science does. Thus, as our foregoing analysis of perception shows, he assumes that there is an external cause of our sensations, that there are material bodies in space, which act on our sense-organs and so serve as the condition of our sense-impressions. More than this, he regards, in the way that has been illustrated in this work, the percept itself, in so far as it is a process in time, as the normal result of the action of such external agents on our nerve-structures, in other words, as the effect of such action in the case of the healthy and perfect nervous organism with the average organized dispositions, physical and psychical; in which case he supposes the percept to correspond, in certain respects at least, with the external cause as made known by physical science. And, on the other hand, he looks on a false or illusory percept as arising in another way not involving, as its condition, the pre-existence of a corresponding material body or physical agent. And in this view of perception, as of other mental phenomena, the psychologist clearly takes for granted the principle that all mental events conform to the law of causation. Further, he assumes that the individual mind is somehow, in a way which it is not his province to inquire into, one and the same throughout, and so on.

The doctrine of evolution, too, in so far as scientific—that is, aiming at giving an account of the historical and pre-historical developments of the collective mind in time—agrees with psychology in making like assumptions. Thus, it conceives an external agency (the environment) as the cause of our common sensations and perceptions. That is to say, it represents the external world as somehow antecedent to, and so apparently independent of, the perceptions which are adjusted to it. And all this shows that science, while removed from vulgar unenlightened opinion, takes sides with popular thought in assuming the truth of certain fundamental ideas or so-called intuitive beliefs, into the exact meaning of which it does not inquire.

When the meaning of these assumptions is investigated, we pass out of the scientific into the philosophic domain. Philosophy has to critically investigate the data of popular thought and of science. It has to discover exactly what is implied in these fundamental principles. Then it has to test their value by erecting a final criterion of truth, by probing the structure of cognition to the bottom, and determining the proper organ of certain or accurate knowledge; or, to put it another way, it has to examine what is meant by reality, whether there is anything real independently of the mind, and if so, what. In doing this it inquires not only what common sense means by its object-world clothed in its variegated garment of secondary qualities, its beauty, and so on, but also what physical science means by its cosmic mechanism of sensible and extra-sensible matter in motion: whether there is any kind of objective reality belonging to the latter which does not also belong to the former; and how the two worlds are related one to another. That is to say, he asks whether the bodies in space assumed to exist by the physicist as the antecedent conditions of particular sensations and percepts are independent of mind and perception generally.[152]

In doing all this, philosophy is theoretically free to upset as much of popular belief of the persistent kind as it likes. Nor can science find fault with it so long as it keeps to its own sphere, and does not directly contradict any truth which science, by the methods proper to it, is able to establish. Thus, for example, if philosophy finds that there is nothing real independently of mind, science will be satisfied so long as it finds a meaning for its assumed entities, such as space, external things, and physical causes.[153]

The student of philosophy need not be told that these imposing-looking problems respecting cognition, making, up what the Germans call the "Theory of Cognition," and the cognate problem respecting the nature of reality, are still a long way from being settled. To-day, as in the days of Plato and Aristotle, are argued, in slightly altered forms, the vexed questions, What is true cognition? Is it a mere efflux from sensation, a passive conformity of representation to sensation (sensualism or empiricism)? or is it, on the other hand, a construction of active thought, involving certain necessary forms of intelligence (rationalism or intuitivism)?

Again, how are we to shape to ourselves real objective existence? Is it something wholly independent of the mind (realism)? and if so, is this known to be what we—meaning here common people and men of science alike—represent it as being (natural realism), or something different (transfigured realism)? Or is it, on the contrary, something involving mind (idealism)? and if so, is it a strictly phenomenal distinction within our conscious experience (empirical idealism, phenomenalism), or one of the two poles of subject and object constituted by every act of thought (rational idealism)? These are some of the questions in philosophy which still await their final answer.

Philosophy being thus still a question and not a solution, we need not here trouble ourselves about its problems further than to remark on their close connection with our special subject, the study of illusion.

Our brief reference to some of the principal inquiries of philosophy shows that it tends to throw doubt on things which the unreflecting popular mind holds to be indubitable. Different schools of philosophy have shown themselves unequally concerned about these so-called intuitive certainties. In general it may be said that philosophy, though, as I have remarked, theoretically free to set up its own standard of certainty, has in practice endeavoured to give a meaning to, and to find a justification for the assumptions or first principles of science. On the other hand, it has not hesitated, when occasion required, to make very light of the intuitive beliefs of the popular mind as interpreted by itself. Thus, rationalists of the Platonic type have not shrunk from pronouncing individual impressions and objects illusory, an assertion which certainly seems to be opposed to the assumptions of common sense, if not to those of science. On the other hand, the modern empirical or association school is quite ready to declare that the vulgar belief in an external world, so far as it represents this as independent of mind,[154] is an illusion; that the so-called necessary beliefs respecting identity, uniformity, causation, etc., are not, strictly speaking, necessary; and so on. And in these ways it certainly seems to come into conflict with popular convictions, or intuitive certainties, as they present themselves to the unreflecting intelligence.

Philosophy seems, then, to be a continuation of that process of detecting illusion with which science in part concerns itself. Indeed, it is evident that our special study has a very close connection with the philosophic inquiry. What philosophy wants is something intuitively certain as its starting-point, some point d'appui for its construction. The errors incident to the process of reasoning do not greatly trouble it, since these can, in general, be guarded against by the rules of logic. But error in the midst of what, on the face of it, looks like intuitive knowledge naturally raises the question, Is there any kind of absolutely certain cognition, any organ for the accurate perception of truth? And this intimate relation between the scientific and the philosophic consideration of illusion is abundantly illustrated in the history of philosophy. The errors of sense, appearing in a region which to the vulgar seems so indubitable, have again and again set men thinking on the question, "What is the whole range of illusion? Is perception, as popularly understood, after all, a big hallucination? Is our life a dream?"[155]

On the other hand, if our study of the wide range of illusion is fitted to induce that temper of mind which is said to be the beginning of philosophy, that attitude of universal doubt expressed by Descartes in his famous maxim, De omnibus dubitandum, a consideration of the process of correction is fitted to lead the mind on to the determination of the conditions of accurate knowledge. It is evident, indeed, that the very conception of an illusion implies a criterion of certainty: to call a thing illusory, is to judge it by reference to some accepted standard of truth.

The mental processes involved in detecting, resisting, and overcoming illusion, are a very interesting subject for the psychologist, though we have not space here to investigate them fully. Turning to presentative, and more particularly sense-illusions, we find that the detection of an illusion takes place now by an appeal from one sense to another, for example, from sight to touch, by way of verification;[156] now (as in Myer's experiment) by a reference from sense and presentation altogether to representation or remembered experience and a process of reasoning; and now, (as in the illusions of art) conversely, by a transition of mind from what is suggested to the actual sense-impression of the moment. In the sphere of memory, again, illusion is determined, as such, now by attending more carefully to the contents of memory, now by a process of reasoning from some presentative cognition. Finally, errors in our comprehensive general representations of things are known to be such partly by reasoning from other conceptions, and partly by a continual process of reduction of representation to presentation, the general to the particular. I may add that the correction of illusion by an act of reflection and reasoning, which brings the part into consistent relation with the whole of experience, includes throughout the comparison of the individual with the collective or social experience.[157]

We may, perhaps, roughly summarize these operations by saying that they consist in the control of the lower automatic processes (association or suggestion) by the higher activities of conscious will. This activity of will takes the form now of an effort of attention to what is directly present to the mind (sense-impression, internal feeling, mnemonic image, etc.), now of conscious reflection, judgment, and reasoning, by which the error is brought into relation to our experience as a whole, individual and collective.

It is for the philosopher to investigate the inmost nature of these operations as they exhibit themselves in our every-day individual experience, and in the large intellectual movements of history. In no better way can he arrive at what common sense and science regard as certain cognition, at the kinds of knowledge on which they are wont to rely most unhesitatingly.

There is one other relation of our subject to philosophic problems which I have purposely left for final consideration. Our study has consisted mainly in the psychological analysis of illusions supposed to be known or capable of being known as such. Now, the modern association school professes to be able to resolve some of the so-called intuitions of common sense into elements exactly similar to those into which we have here been resolving what are acknowledged by all as illusions. This fact would seem to point to a close connection between the scientific study of illusion and the particular view of these fundamental intuitions taken by one philosophic school. In order to see whether there is really this connection, we must reflect a little further on the nature of the method which we have been pursuing.

I have already had occasion to rise the expression "scientific psychology," or psychology as a positive science, and the meaning of this expression must now be more carefully considered. As a positive science, psychology is limited to the function of analyzing mental states, and of tracing their origin in previous and more simple mental states. It has, strictly speaking, nothing to do with the question of the legitimacy or validity of any mental act.

Take a percept, for example. Psychology can trace its parentage in sensation, the mode in which it has come by its contents in the laws of association. But by common consent, a percept implies a presentative apprehension of an object now present to sense. Is this valid or illusory? This question psychology, as science, does not attempt to answer. It would not, I conceive, answer it even if it were able to make out that the whole mental content in the percept can be traced back to elementary sensations and their combinations. For the fact that in the chemistry of mind elements may combine in perfectly new forms does not disprove that the forms thus arising, whether sentiments or quasi-cognitions, are invalid. Much less can psychology dispute the validity of a percept if it cannot be sure that the mind adds nothing to sensation and its grouping; that in the genesis of the perceptive state, with its intuition of something external and now present as object, nothing like a form of intelligence is superimposed on the elements of sensation, giving to the result of their coalescence the particular unity which we find. Whether psychology as a positive science can ever be sure of this: whether, that is to say, it can answer the question, "How do we come by the idea of object?" without assuming some particular philosophic or extra-scientific theory respecting the ultimate nature of mind, is a point which I purposely leave open.

I would contend, then, that the psychologist, in tracing the genesis of the percept out of previous mental experiences, no more settles the question, What is the object of perception? than the physicist settles it in referring the sense-impression (and so the percept) to a present material agent as its condition.

The same applies to our idea of self. I may discover the concrete experiences which supply the filling in of the idea, and yet not settle the question, Does intelligence add anything in the construction of the form of this idea? and still less settle the question whether there is any real unity answering to the idea.

If this is a correct distinction, if psychology, as science, does not determine questions of validity or objective meaning but only of genesis, if it looks at mental states in relation only to their temporal and causal concomitants and not to their objects, it must follow that our preceding analysis of illusion involves no particular philosophic theory as to the nature of intelligence, but, so far as accurate, consists of scientific facts which all philosophic theories of intelligence must alike be prepared to accept. And I have little doubt that each of the two great opposed doctrines, the intuitive and the associational, would claim to be in a position to take up these facts into its particular theory, and to view them in its own way.

But in addition to this scientific psychology, there is another so-called psychology, which is, strictly speaking, philosophic. This, I need hardly say, is the association philosophy. It proceeds by analyzing certain cognitions and sentiments into their elements, and straightway declaring that they mean nothing more than these. That is to say, the associationist passes from genesis to validity, from the history of a conscious state to its objective meaning. Thus, from showing that an intuitive belief, say that in causation, is not original (in the individual or at least in the race), it goes on to assert that it is not a valid immediate cognition at all. Now, I am not concerned here to inquire into the logical value of this transition, but simply to point out that it is extra-scientific and distinctly philosophic. If logically justifiable, it is so because of some plainly philosophic assumption, as that made by Hume, namely, that all ideas not derived from impressions are to this extent fictitious or illusory.

And now we are in a position to understand the bearing of our scientific analysis of acknowledged illusions on the associationist's treatment of the alleged illusions of common sense. There is no doubt, I think, that some of the so-called intuitions of common sense have points of analogy to acknowledged illusions. For example, the conviction in the act of perception that something external to the mind and independent of it exists, has a certain superficial resemblance to an hallucination of sense; and moreover, the associationist seeks to explain it by means of these very processes which underlie what is recognized by all as sense-illusion.[158] Again, it may be said that our notions of force and of a causal nexus in the physical world imply the idea of conscious energy as known through our muscular sensations, and so have a suspicious resemblance to those anthropomorphic illusions of which I have spoken under Illusions of Insight. Once more, the consciousness of freedom may, as I have suggested, be viewed as analogous in its form and its mode of origin to illusions of introspection. As a last example, it may be said that the mind's certain conviction of the innateness of some of its ideas resembles those illusions of memory which arise through an inability to think ourselves back into a remote past having a type of consciousness widely unlike that of the present.

But now, mark the difference. In our scientific analysis of popularly known illusions, we had something by which to determine the illusory character of the presentation or belief. We had a popularly or scientifically accepted standard of certainty, by a reference to which we might test the particular soi-disant cognition. But in the case of these fundamental beliefs we have no such criterion, except we adopt some particular philosophic theory, say that of the associationist himself. Hence this similarity in structure and origin cannot in itself be said to amount to a proof of equality of logical or objective value. Here again it must be remarked that origin, does not carry validity or invalidity with it.[159]

We thus come back to our starting-point. While there are close relations, psychological and logical, between the scientific study of the ascertained facts of illusion and the philosophic determination of what is illusory in knowledge as a whole, the two domains must be clearly distinguished. On purely scientific ground we cannot answer the question, "How far does illusion extend?" The solution of this question must be handed over to the philosopher, as one aspect of his problem of cognition.

One or two remarks may, perhaps, be hazarded in concluding this account of the relation of the scientific to the philosophic problem of illusion. Science, as we have seen, takes its stand on a stable consensus, a body of commonly accepted belief. And this being so, it would seem to follow, that so far as she is allowed to interest herself in philosophic questions, she will naturally be disposed to ask, What beliefs are shared in by all minds, so far as normal and developed? In other words, she will be inclined to look at universality as the main thing to be determined in the region of philosophic inquiry. The metaphysical sceptic, fond of daring exploits, may break up as many accepted ideas as he likes into illusory debris, provided only he has some bit of reality left to take his stand on. Meanwhile, the scientific mind, here agreeing with the practical mind, will ask, "Will the beliefs thus said to be capable of being shown to be illusory ever cease to exercise their hold on men's minds, including that of the iconoclast himself? Is the mode of demonstration of such a kind as to be likely ever to materially weaken the common-sense 'intuition'?"