[16] An American author, Morton Prince, lately remarked this: Philosophical Review, July 1904, p. 450.
[17] This Flournoy recently has shown very wittily. See in Arch. de Psychol., Nov. 1904, his article on Panpsychism.
[18] This extract, together with the two subsequent, are borrowed from an excellent lecture by Flournoy, on Métaphysique et Physiologie. Georg: Geneva, 1890.
CHAPTER III
DEFINITION OF THE IMAGE
Going on with our inventory, after sensations come images, ideas, and concepts; in fact, quite a collection of phenomena, which, are generally considered as essentially psychological.
So long as one does not carefully analyse the value of ideas, one remains under the impression that ideas form a world apart, which is sharply distinguished from the physical world, and behaves towards it as an antithesis. For is not conception the contrary of perception? and is not the ideal in opposition to reality?
Thoughts have some characteristics of fancy, of freedom, even of unreality, which are wanting to the prosaicness of heavy material things. Thoughts sport with the relations of time and space; they fly in a moment across the gulf between the most distant objects; they travel back up the course of time; they bring near to us events centuries away; they conceive objects which are unreal; they imagine combinations which upset all physical laws, and, further, these conceptions remain invisible to others as well as to ourselves. They are outside the grip of reality, and constitute a world which becomes, for any one with the smallest imagination, as great and as important as the world called real. One may call in evidence the poets, novelists, artists, and the dreamers of all kinds. When life becomes too hard for us, we fly to the ideal world, there to seek forgetfulness or compensation.