Illusions : a psychological study.

  • Sully, James, 1842-1923.
Date:
1905
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Licence: In copyright

Credit: Illusions : a psychological study. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by UCL Library Services. The original may be consulted at UCL (University College London)

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    THE CLASSIFICATION OF ILLUSIONS. sometimes groups together varieties of animals which the unscientific eye would never think of connecting, so the psychologist may analyze mental operations which appear widely dissimilar to the popular mind, and reduce them to one fundamental process. Thus recent psychology draws no sharp distinction between per- ception and recollection. It finds in both very much the same elements, though combined in a different way Strictly speaking, indeed, perception must be defined as a presentative-representative operation. To the psychologist it comes to very much the same thing whether, for example, on a visit to Switzerland, our minds are occupied in perceiving the distance of a mountain or in remembering some pleasant excursion which we made to it on a former visit. In both cases there is a reinstatement of the past; a reproduction of earlier experience, a process of adding to a present impression a product of imagination—taking this word in its widest sense. In both cases the same laws of reproduction or association are illustrated. Just as a deep and exhaustive analysis of the intellectual operations thus tends to identify their various forms as they are distinguished by the popular mind, so a thorough investigation of the flaws in these operations, that is to say, the counterfeits of knowledge, will probably lead to an identification of the essential mental process which underlies them. It is apparent, for example, that, whether a man projects some figment of his imagination into the external world, giving it, present material reality, or whether (if I may be allowed the term) he retrojects it into the dim region of the past, and takes it for a reality that has been