Illusions: A Psychological Study

by James Sully

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.