Illusions: A Psychological Study

by James Sully

At such times our minds are in a state of pure feeling: intellectual discrimination and comparison are no longer possible. In this way our emotions in the moments of their greatest intensity carry away our intellects with them, confusing the region of pure imagination with that of truth and certainty, and even the narrow domain of the present with the vast domain of the past and future. In this condition differences of present and future may be said to disappear and the energy of the emotion to constitute an immediate assurance of its existence absolutely.[104]

The great region for the illustration of these active illusions is that of the moral and religious life. With respect to our real motives, our dominant aspirations, and our highest emotional experiences, we are greatly liable to deceive ourselves. The moralist and the theologian have clearly recognized the possibilities of self-deception in matters of feeling and impulse. To them it is no mystery that the human heart should mistake the fictitious for the real, the momentary and evanescent for the abiding. And they have recognized, too, the double bias in these errors, namely, the powerful disposition to exaggerate the intensity and persistence of a present feeling on the one hand, and on the other hand to take a mere wish to feel in a particular way for the actual possession of the feeling.

Philosophic Illusions.

The opinion of theologians respecting the nature of moral introspection presents a singular contrast to that entertained by some philosophers as to the nature of self-consciousness. It is supposed by many of these that in interrogating their internal consciousness they are lifted above all risk of error. The "deliverance of consciousness" is to them something bearing the seal of a supreme authority, and must not be called in question. And so they make an appeal to individual consciousness a final resort in all matters of philosophical dispute.

Now, on the face of it, it does not seem probable that this operation should have an immunity from all liability to error. For the matters respecting which we are directed to introspect ourselves, are the most subtle and complex things of our intellectual and emotional life. And some of these philosophers even go so far as to affirm that the plain man is quite equal to the niceties of this process.

It has been brought as a charge against some of these same philosophers that they have based certain of their doctrines on errors of introspection. This charge must, of course, be received with some sort of suspicion here, since it has been brought forward by avowed disciples of an opposite philosophic school. Nevertheless, as there is from our present disinterested and purely scientific point of view a presumption that philosophers like other men are fallible, and since it is certain that philosophical introspection does not materially differ from other kinds, it seems permissible just to glance at some of these alleged illusions in relation to other and more vulgar forms. Further reference to them will be made at the end of our study.

These so-called philosophical illusions will be found, like the vulgar ones just spoken of, to illustrate the distinction drawn between passive and active illusions. That is to say, the alleged misreading of individual consciousness would result now from a confusion of distinct elements, including wrong suggestion, due to the intricacies of the phenomena, now from a powerful predisposition to read something into the phenomena.

A kind of illusion in which the passive element seems most conspicuous would be the error into which the interrogator of the individual consciousness is said to fall respecting simple unanalyzable states of mind. On the face of it, it is not likely that a mere inward glance at the tangle of conscious states should suffice to determine what is such a perfectly simple mental phenomenon. Accordingly, when a writer declares that an act of introspection demonstrates the simple unanalyzable character of such a feeling as the sentiment of beauty or that of moral approval, the opponent of this view clearly has some show of argument for saying that this simplicity may be altogether illusory and due to the absence of a perfect act of attention. Similarly, when it is said that the idea of space contains no representations of muscular sensation, the statement may clearly arise from the want of a sufficiently careful kind of introspective analysis.[105]

In most cases of these alleged philosophical errors, however, the active and passive factors seem to combine. There are certain intricacies in the mental phenomenon itself favouring the chances of error, and there are independent predispositions leading the mind to look at the phenomenon in a wrong way. This seems to apply to the famous declaration of a certain school of thinkers that by an act of introspection we can intuit the fact of liberty, that is to say, a power of spontaneous determination of action superior to and regulative of the influence of motives. It may be plausibly contended that this idea arises partly from a mixing up of facts of present consciousness with inferences from them, and partly from a natural predisposition of the mind to invest itself with this supreme power of absolute origination.[106]

In a similar way, it might be contended that other famous philosophic dicta are founded on a process of erroneous introspection of subjective mental states. In some cases, indeed, it seems a plausible explanation to regard these illusions as mere survivals in attenuated shadowy form of grosser popular illusions. But this is not yet the time to enter on these, which, moreover, hardly fall perhaps under our definition of an illusion of introspection.