Illusions - James Sully (online e reader .txt) 📗

of the illusion completely masters us. For the moment we lose sight of the theatrical surroundings, and see the actor as really carried away by the passion which he so closely imitates. Histrionic illusion is as complete as any artistic variety can venture to be.[108]

I have said that our insights are limited by our own mental experience, and so by introspection. In truth, every interpretation of another's look and word is determined ultimately, not by what we have previously observed in others, but by what we have personally felt, or at least have in a sense made our own by intense sympathy. Hence we may, in general, regard an illusion of insight on the active side as a hasty projection of our own feelings, thoughts, etc., into other minds.

We habitually approach others with a predisposition to attribute to them our own modes of thinking and feeling. And this predisposition will be the more powerful, the more desirous we are for sympathy, and for that confirmation of our own views which the reflection of another mind affords. Thus, when making a new acquaintance, people are in general disposed to project too much of themselves into the person who is the object of inspection. They intuitively endow him with their own ideas, ways of looking at things, prejudices of sentiment, and so on, and receive something like a shock when later on they find out how different he is from this first hastily formed and largely performed image.

The same thing occurs in the reading of literature, and the appreciation of the arts of expression generally. We usually approach an author with a predisposition to read our own habits of thought and sentiment into his words. It is probably a characteristic defect of a good deal of current criticism of remote writers to attribute to them too much of our modern conceptions and aims. Similarly, we often import our own special feelings into the utterances of the poet and of the musical composer. That much of this intuition is illusory, may be seen by a little attention to the "intuitions" of different critics. Two readers of unlike emotional organization will find incompatible modes of feeling in the same poet. And everybody knows how common it is for musical critics and amateurs to discover quite dissimilar feelings in the same composition.[109]

The effect of this active projection of personal feeling will, of course, be seen most strikingly when there is a certain variety of feeling actually excited at the time in the observer's mind. A man who is in a particularly happy mood tends to reflect his exuberant gladness on others. The lover, in the moment of exalted emotion, reads a response to all his aspirations in his mistress's eyes. Again, a man will tend to project his own present ideas into the minds of others, and so imagine that they know what he knows; and this sometimes leads to a comical kind of embarrassment, and even to a betrayal of something which it was the interest of the person to keep to himself. Once more, in interpreting language, we may sometimes catch ourselves mistaking the meaning, owing to the presence of a certain idea in the mind at the time. Thus, if I have just been thinking of Comte, and overhear a person exclaim, "I'm positive," I irresistibly tend, for the moment, to ascribe to him an avowal of discipleship to the great positivist.

Poetic Illusion.

The most remarkable example of this projection of feeling is undoubtedly illustrated in the poetic interpretation of inanimate nature. The personification of tree, mountain, ocean, and so on, illustrates, no doubt, the effect of association and external suggestion; for there are limits to such personification. But resemblance and suggestion commonly bear, in this case, but a small proportion to active constructive imagination. One might, perhaps, call this kind of projection the hallucination of insight, since there is nothing objective corresponding to the interpretative image.

The imaginative and poetic mind is continually on the look out for hints of life, consciousness, and emotion in nature. It finds a certain kind of satisfaction in this half-illusory, dream-like transformation of nature. The deepest ground of this tendency must probably be looked for in the primitive ideas of the race, and the transmission by inheritance of the effect of its firmly fixed habits of mind. The undisciplined mind of early man, incapable of distinguishing the object of perception from the product of spontaneous imagination, and taking his own double existence as the type of all existence, actually saw the stream, the ocean, and the mountain as living beings; and so firmly rooted is this way of regarding objects, that even our scientifically trained minds find it a relief to relapse occasionally into it.[110]

While there is this general imaginative disposition in the poetic mind to endow nature with life and consciousness, there are special tendencies to project the individual feelings into objects. Every imaginative mind looks for reflections of its own deepest feelings in the world about it. The lonely embittered heart, craving for sympathy, which he cannot meet with in his fellow-man, finds traces of it in the sighing of the trees or the moaning of the sad sea-wave. Our Poet Laureate, in his great elegy, has abundantly illustrated this impulse of the imagination to reflect its own emotional colouring on to inanimate things: for example in the lines—

"The wild unrest that lives in woe
Would dote and pore on yonder cloud
That rises upward always higher,
And onward drags a labouring breast,
And topples round the dreary west,
A looming bastion fringed with fire."

So far I have been considering active illusions of insight as arising through the play of the impulse of the individual mind to project its feelings outwards, or to see their reflections in external things. I must now add that active illusion may be due to causes similar to those which we have seen to operate in the sphere of illusory perception and introspection. That is to say, there may be a disposition, permanent or temporary, to ascribe a certain kind of feeling to others in accordance with our wishes, fears, and so on.

To give an illustration of the permanent causes, it is well known that a conceited man will be disposed to attribute admiration of himself to others. On the other hand, a shy, timid person will be prone to read into other minds the opposite kind of feeling.

Coming to temporary forces, we find that any expectation to meet with a particular kind of mental trait in a new acquaintance will dispose the observer hastily and erroneously to attribute corresponding feelings to the person. And if this expectation springs out of a present feeling, the bias to illusory insight is still more powerful. For example, a child that fears its parent's displeasure will be prone to misinterpret the parent's words and actions, colouring them according to its fears. So an angry man, strongly desirous of making out that a person has injured him, will be disposed to see signs of conscious guilt in this person's looks or words. Similarly, a lover will read fine thoughts or sentiments into the mind of his mistress under the influence of a strong wish to admire.

And what applies to the illusory interpretation of others' feelings applies to the ascription of feelings to inanimate objects. This is due not simply to the impulse to expand one's conscious existence through far-reaching resonances of sympathy, but also to a permanent or temporary disposition to attribute a certain kind of feeling to an object. Thus, the poet personifies nature in part because his emotional cravings prompt him to construct the idea of something that can be admired or worshipped. Once more, the action of a momentary feeling when actually excited is seen in the "mechanical" impulse of a man to retaliate when he strikes his foot against an object, as a chair, which clearly involves a tendency to attribute an intention to hurt to the unoffending body, and the rationale of which odd procedure is pretty correctly expressed in the popular phrase: "It relieves the feelings."

It is worth noting, perhaps, that these illusions of insight, like those of perception, may involve an inattention to the actual impression of the moment. To erroneously attribute a feeling to another through an excess of sympathetic eagerness is often to overlook what a perfectly dispassionate observer would see, as, for example, the immobility of the features or the signs of a deliberate effort to simulate. This inattention will, it is obvious, be greatest in the poetic attribution of life and personality to natural objects, in so far as this approximates to a complete momentary illusion. To see a dark overhanging rock as a grim sombre human presence, is for the moment to view it under this aspect only, abstracting from its many obvious unlikenesses.

In the same manner, a tendency to read a particular meaning into a word may lead to the misapprehension of the word. To give an illustration: I was lately reading the fifth volume of G. H. Lewes's Problems of Life and Mind. In reading the first sentence of one of the sections, I again and again fell into the error of taking "The great Lagrange," for "The great Language." On glancing back I saw that the section was headed "On Language," and I at once recognized the cause of my error in the pre-existence in my mind of the representative image of the word "language."

In concluding this short account of the errors of insight, I may observe that their range is obviously much greater than that of the previously considered classes of presentative illusion. This is, indeed, involved in what has been said about the nature of the process. Insight, as we have seen, though here classed with preservative cognition, occupies a kind of border-land between immediate knowledge or intuition and inference, shading off from the one to the other. And in the very nature of the case the scope for error must be great. Even overlooking human reticence, and, what is worse, human hypocrisy, the conditions of an accurate reading of others' minds are rarely realized. If, as has been remarked by a good authority, one rarely meets, even among intelligent people, with a fairly accurate observer of external things, what shall be said as to the commonly claimed power of "intuitive insight" into other people's thoughts and feelings, as though it were a process above suspicion? It is plain, indeed, on a little reflection, that, taking into account what is required in the way of large and varied experience (personal and social), a habit of careful introspection, as well as a habit of subtle discriminative attention to the external signs of mental life, and lastly, a freedom from prepossession and bias, only a very few can ever hope even to approximate to good readers of character.

And then we have to bear in mind that this large amount of error is apt to remain uncorrected. There is not, as in the case of external perception, an easy way of verification, by calling in another sense; a misapprehension, once formed, is apt to remain, and I need hardly say that errors in these matters of mutual comprehension have their palpable practical consequences. All social cohesion and co-operation rest on this comprehension, and are limited by its degree of perfection. Nay, more, all common knowledge itself, in so far as it depends on a mutual communication of impressions, ideas, and beliefs, is limited by the fact of this great liability to error in what at first seems to be one of the most certain kinds of knowledge.

In view of this depressing amount of error, our solace must be found in