Illusions: A Psychological Study

by James Sully

What applies to the perception of beauty in the narrow sense will apply to all other modes of æsthetic intuition, as that of the sublime and the ludicrous, and the recognition of the opposite of beauty or the ugly. In like manner, it will apply to moral intuition in so far as it is an instantaneous recognition of a certain quality in a perceived action based on, or at least conjoined with, a particular emotional effect. In men's intuitive judgments respecting the right and the wrong, the noble and base, the admirable and contemptible, and so on, we may see the same kind of illusory universalizing of personal feeling as we have seen in their judgments respecting the beautiful. And the sources of the error are the same in the two cases. Accidents of experience, giving special associations to the actions, will not unfrequently warp the individual intuition. Ethical culture, like æsthetic culture, means a continual casting aside of early illusory habits of intuition. And further, moral intuition illustrates all those effects of feeling which we have briefly traced in the case of æsthetic intuition. The perversions of the moral intuition under the sway of prejudice are too familiar to need more than a bare allusion.

Nature of Insight.

There remains one further mode of cognition which approximates in character to presentative knowledge, and is closely related to external perception. I refer to the commonly called "intuitive" process by which we apprehend the feelings and thoughts of other minds through the external signs of movement, vocal sound, etc., which make up expression and language. This kind of knowledge, which is not sufficiently marked off from external perception on the one side and introspection on the other, I venture to call Insight.

I am well aware that this interpretation of the mental states of others is commonly described as a process of inference involving a conscious reference to our own similar experiences. I willingly grant that it is often so. At the same time, it must be perfectly plain that it is not always so. It is, indeed, doubtful whether in its first stages in early life it is invariably so, for there seem to be good reasons for attributing to the infant mind a certain degree of instinctive or inherited capability in making out the looks and tones of others.[107] And, however this may be, it is certain that with the progress of life a good part of this interpretation comes to be automatic or unconscious, approximating in character to a sense-perception. To recognize contentment in a placid smile is, one would say, hardly less immediate and intuitive than to recognize the coolness of a stream.

We must, of course, all allow that the fusion of the presentative and the representative element is, speaking generally, more complete in the case of sense-perception than in that here considered. In spite of Berkeley's masterly account of the rationale of visual perception as an interpretation of "visual language" and all that has confirmed it, the plain man cannot, at the moment of looking at an object, easily bring himself to admit that distance is not directly present to his vision. On the other hand, on cool reflection, he will recognize that the complacent benevolent sentiment is distinct from the particular movements and changes in the eye and other features which express it. Yet, while admitting this, I must contend that there is no very hard and fast line dividing the two processes, but that the reading of others' feelings approximates in character to an act of perception.

An intuitive insight may, then, be defined as that instantaneous, automatic, or "unconscious" mode of interpreting another's feeling which occurs whenever the feeling is fully expressed, and when its signs are sufficiently familiar to us. This definition will include the interpretation of thoughts by means of language, though not, of course, the belief in an objective fact grounded on a recognition of another's belief. On the other hand, it will exclude all the more complex interpretations of looks and words which imply conscious comparison, reflection, and reasoning. Further, it will exclude a large part of the interpretation of actions as motived, since this, though sometimes approaching the intuitive form, is for the most part a process of conjectural or doubtful inference, and wanting in the immediate assurance which belongs to an intuitive reading of a present emotion or thought.

From this short account of the process of insight, its relation to perception and introspection becomes pretty plain. On the one hand, it closely resembles sense-perception, since it proceeds by the interpretation of a sense-impression by means of a representative image. On the other hand, it differs from sense-perception, and is more closely allied to introspection in the fact that, while the process of interpretation in the former case is a reconstruction of external experiences, in the latter case it is a reconstruction of internal experiences. To intuit another's feeling is clearly to represent to ourselves a certain kind of internal experience previously known, in its elements at least, by introspection, while these represented experiences are distinctly referred to another personality.

And now we see what constitutes the object of insight. This is, in part, a common experience, as in the case of sense-perception and æsthetic intuition, since to perceive another's feeling is implicitly to cognize the external conditions of a common insight. But this is clearly not the whole, nor even the main part of objective reality in this act of cognition. An intuitive insight differs from a sense-perception in that it involves an immediate assurance of the existence of a feeling presentatively known, though not to our own minds. The object in insight is thus a presentative feeling as in introspection, though not our own, but another's. And so it differs from the object in sense-perception in so far as this last involves sense-experiences, as muscular and tactual feelings, which are not at the moment presentatively known to any mind.

Illusions of Insight.

And now we are in a position, perhaps, to define an illusion of insight, and to inquire whether there is anything answering to our definition. An illusory insight is a quasi-intuition of another's feelings which does not answer to the internal reality as presentatively known to the subject himself. In spite of the errors of introspection dealt with in the last chapter, nobody will doubt that, when it is a question between a man's knowing what is at the moment in his own mind and somebody else's knowing, logic, as well as politeness, requires us to give precedence to the former.