Illusions Part 16

So far I have supposed that the antic.i.p.ated event is a recurring one, that is to say, a kind of experience which has already become familiar to us. This, however, holds good only of a very few of our experiences.

Our life changes as it progresses, both outwardly and inwardly. Many of our antic.i.p.ations, when first formed, involve much more than a reproduction of a past experience, namely, a complex act of constructive imagination. Our representations of these untried experiences, as, for example, those connected with a new set of circ.u.mstances, a new social condition, a new mode of occupation, and so on, are clearly at the first far from simple processes of inference from the past. They are put together by the aid of many fragmentary images, restored by distinct threads of a.s.sociation, yet by a process so rapid as to appear like an intuition. Indeed, the antic.i.p.ation of such new experiences more often resembles an instantaneous imaginative intuition than a process of conscious transition from old experiences. In the case of these expectations, then, there would clearly seem to be room for illusion from the first.

But even supposing that the errors connected with the first formation of an expectation cannot strictly be called illusory, we may see that such simple expectation will, in certain cases, tend to grow into something quite indistinguishable from illusion. I refer to expectations of _remote_ events which allow of frequent renewal. Even supposing the expectation to have originated from some rational source, as from a conscious inference from past experience, or from the acceptance of somebody's statement, the very habit of cheris.h.i.+ng the antic.i.p.ation tends to invest it with an automatic self-sufficient character. To all intents and purposes the prevision becomes intuitive, by which I mean that the mind is at the time immediately certain that something is going to happen, without needing to fall back on memory or reflection. This being so, whenever the initial process of inference or quasi-inference happens to have been bad, an illusory expectation may arise. In other words, the force of repet.i.tion and habit tends to harden what may, in its initial form, have resembled a kind of fallacy into an illusion.

And now let us proceed further. When a permanent expectation is thus formed, there arises the possibility of processes which favour illusion precisely a.n.a.logous to those which we have studied in the case of memory.

In the first place, the habit of imagining a future event is attended with a considerable amount of illusion as to time or remoteness. After what has been said respecting the conditions of such error in the case of memory, a very few words will suffice here.

It is clear, then, in the first place, that the mind will tend to shorten any period of future time, and so to antedate, so to speak, a given event, in so far as the imagination is able clearly and easily to run over its probable experiences. From this it follows that repeated forecastings of series of events, by facilitating the imaginative process, tend to beget an illusory appearance of contraction in the time antic.i.p.ated. Moreover, since in antic.i.p.ation so much of each division of the future time-line is unknown, it is obviously easy for the expectant imagination to skip over long intervals, and so to bring together widely remote events.

In addition to this general error, there are more special errors. As in the case of recollection, vividness of mental image suggests propinquity; and accordingly, all vivid antic.i.p.ations, to whatever cause the vividness may be owing, whether to powerful suggestion on the part of external objects, to verbal suggestion, or to spontaneous imagination and feeling, are apt to represent their objects as too near.

It follows that an event intensely longed for, in so far as the imagination is busy in representing it, will seem to approach the present. At the same time, as we have seen, an event much longed for commonly appears to be a great while coming, the explanation being that there is a continually renewed contradiction between antic.i.p.ation and perception. The self-adjustment of the mind in the att.i.tude of expectant attention proves again and again to be vain and futile, and it is this fact which brings home to it the slowness of the sequences of perceived fact, as compared with the rapidity of the sequences of imagination.

When speaking of the retrospective estimate of time, I observed that the apparent distance of an event depends on our representation of the intervening time-segment. And the same remark applies to the prospective estimate. Thus, an occurrence which we expect to happen next week will seem specially near if we know little or nothing of the contents of the intervening s.p.a.ce, for in this case the imagination does not project the experience behind a number of other distinctly represented events.

Finally, it is to be remarked that the prospective appreciation of any duration will tend to err relatively by way of excess, where the time is exceptionally filled out with clearly expected and deeply interesting experiences. To the imagination of the child, a holiday, filled with new experiences, appears to be boundless.

Thus far I have a.s.sumed that the date of the future event is a matter which might be known. It is, however, obvious, from the very nature of knowledge with respect to the future, that we may sometimes be certain of a thing happening to us without knowing with any degree of definiteness when it will happen. In the case of these temporally undefined expectations, the law already expounded holds good that all vividness of representation tends to lend the things represented an appearance of approaching events. On the other hand, there are some events, such as our own death, which our instinctive feelings tend to banish to a region so remote as hardly to be realized at all.

So much with respect to errors in the localizing of future events.

In the second place, a habit of imagining a future event or group of events will give play to those forces which tend to transform a mental image. In other words, the habitual indulgence of a certain antic.i.p.ation tends to an illusory view, not only of the "when?" but also of the "how?" of the future event. These transformations, due to subtle processes of emotion and intellect, and reflecting the present habits of these, exactly resemble those by which a remembered event becomes gradually transformed. Thus, we carry on our present habits of thought and feeling into the remote future, foolishly imagining that at a distant period of life, or in greatly altered circ.u.mstances, we shall desire and aim at the same things as now in our existing circ.u.mstances.

In close connection with this forward projection of our present selves, there betrays itself a tendency to look on future events as answering to our present desires and aspirations. In this way, we are wont to soften, beautify, and idealize the future, marking it off from the hard matter-of-fact present.

The less like the future experience to our past experience, or the more remote the time antic.i.p.ated, the greater the scope for such imaginative transformation. And from this stage of fanciful transformation of a future reality to the complete imaginative creation of such a reality, the step is but a small one. Here we reach the full development of illusory expectation, that which corresponds to hallucination in the region of sense-perception.

In order to understand these extreme forms of illusory expectation, it will be necessary to say something more about the relation of imagination to antic.i.p.ation in general. There are, I conceive, good reasons for saying that any kind of vivid imagination tends to pa.s.s into a semblance of an expectation of a coming personal experience, or an event that is about to happen within the sphere of our own observation.

It has long been recognized by writers, among whom I may mention Dugald Stewart, that to distinctly imagine an event or object is to feel for the moment a degree of belief in the corresponding reality. Now, I have already said that expectation is probably a more natural and an earlier developed state of mind than memory. And so it seems probable that any mental image which happens to take hold on the mind, if not recognized as one of memory, or as corresponding to a fact in somebody else's experience, naturally a.s.sumes the form of an expectation of a personal experience. The force of the expectation will vary in general as the vividness and persistence of the mental image. Moreover, it follows, from what has been said, that this force of imagination will determine what little time-character we ever give to these wholly ungrounded illusions.

We see, then, that any process of spontaneous imagination will tend to beget some degree of illusory expectation. And among the agencies by which such ungrounded imagination arises, the promptings of feeling play the most conspicuous part. A present emotional excitement may give to an imaginative antic.i.p.ation, such as that of the prophetic enthusiast, a reality which approximates to that of an actually perceived object. And even where this force of excitement is wanting, a gentle impulse of feeling may suffice to beget an a.s.surance of a distant reality. The unknown recesses of the remote future offer, indeed, the field in which the illusory impulses of our emotional nature have their richest harvest.

"Thus, from afar, each dim discover'd scene More pleasing seems than all the past hath been; And every form, that Fancy can repair From dark oblivion, glows divinely there."

The recurring emotions, the ruling aspirations, find objects for themselves in this veiled region. Feelings too shy to burst forth in unseemly antic.i.p.ation 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 pus.h.i.+ng 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 antic.i.p.ations 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 s.p.a.ce 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 a.s.surance 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 pa.s.sage 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 a.s.similated 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 ill.u.s.trate 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 a.s.surance. 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 ill.u.s.trated, 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 ill.u.s.trated 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 a.s.surance a.s.sumes the aspect of a perfectly intuitive conviction. The h.o.a.ry traditional myths respecting the golden age, and so on, and the persistent errors of historians under the sway of a strong emotional bias, ill.u.s.trate such illusions.

So much as to simple illusions of belief, or such as involve single representations only. Let us now pa.s.s to compound illusions, which involve a complex group of representations.

B. _Compound Illusory Belief._

A familiar example of a compound belief is the belief in a permanent or persistent individual object of a certain character. Such an idea, whatever its whole meaning may be--and this is a disputed point in philosophy--certainly seems to include a number of particular representations, corresponding to direct personal recollections, to the recollections of others, and to numerous antic.i.p.ations of ourselves and of others. And if the object be a living creature endowed with feelings, our idea of it will contain, in addition to these represented perceptions of ourselves or of others, a series of represented insights, namely, such as correspond to the inner experience of the being, so far as this is known or imagined.

It would thus seem that the idea which we habitually carry about with us respecting a complex individual object is a very composite idea. In order to see this more fully, let us inquire into what is meant by our belief in a person. My idea of a particular friend contains, among other things, numbers of vague representations of his habitual modes of feeling and acting, and numbers of still more vague expectations of how he will or might feel and act in certain circ.u.mstances.

Now, it is plain that such a composite idea must have been a very slow growth, involving, in certain stages of its formation, numerous processes of inference or quasi-inference from the past to the future.

But in process of time these elements fuse inseparably: the directly known and the inferred no longer stand apart in my mind; my whole conception of the individual as he has been, is, and will be, seems one indivisible cognition; and this cognition is so firmly fixed and presents itself so instantaneously to the mind when I think of the object, that it has all the appearance of an intuitive conviction.

If this is a fairly accurate description of the structure of these compound representations and of their attendant beliefs, it is easy to see how many openings for error they cover. To begin with, my representation of so complex a thing as a concrete personality must always be exceedingly inadequate and fragmentary. I see only a few facets of the person's many-sided mind and character. And yet, in general, I am not aware of this, but habitually identify my representation with the totality of the object.

More than this, a little attention to the process by which these compound beliefs arise will disclose the fact that this apparently adequate representation of another has arisen in part by other than logical processes. If the blending of memory and expectation were simply a mingling of facts with correct inferences from these, it might not greatly matter; but it is something very different from this. Not only has our direct observation of the person been very limited, even that which we have been able to see has not been perfectly mirrored in our memory. It has already been remarked that recollection is a selective process, and this truth is strikingly ill.u.s.trated in the growth of our enduring representations of things. What stamps itself on my memory is what surprised me or what deeply interested me at the moment. And then there are all the risks of mnemonic illusion to be taken into account as well. Thus, my idea of a person, so far even as it is built up on a basis of direct personal recollection, is essentially a fragmentary and to some extent a misleading representation.

Nor is this all. My habitual idea of a person is a resultant of forces of memory conjoined with other forces. Among these are to be reckoned the influence of illusory perception or insight, my own and that of others. The amount of misinterpretation of the words and actions of a single human being during the course of a long acquaintance must be very considerable. To these must be added the effect of erroneous single expectations and reconstructions of past experiences, in so far as these have not been distinctly contradicted and dissipated. All these errors, connected with single acts of observing or inferring the feelings and doings of another, have their effect in distorting the subsequent total representation of the person.

Finally, we must include a more distinct ingredient of active illusion, namely, all the complex effects of the activity of imagination as led, not by fact and experience, but by feeling and desire. Our permanent idea of another reflects all that we have fondly imagined the person capable of doing, and thus is made up of an ideal as well as a real actually known personality. And this result of spontaneous imagination must be taken to include the ideals entertained by others who are likely to have influenced us by their beliefs.[142]

Enough has probably been said to show how immensely improbable it is that our permanent cognition of so complex an object as a particular human being should be at all an accurate representation of the reality, how much of the erroneous is certain to get mixed up with the true. And this being so, we may say that our apparently simple direct cognition of a given person, our a.s.surance of what he is and will continue to be, is to some extent illusory.

_Illusion of Self-Esteem._

Let us now pa.s.s to another case of compound representation, where the illusory element is still more striking. I refer to the idea of self which each of us habitually carries about with him. Every man's opinion of himself, as a whole, is a very complex mental product, in which facts known by introspection no doubt play a part, but probably only a very subordinate part. It is obvious, from what has been said about the structure of our habitual representations of other individuals, that our ordinary representation of ourselves will be tinged with that ma.s.s of error which we have found to be connected with single acts of introspection, recollections of past personal experience, and illusory single expectations of future personal experiences. How large an opening for erroneous conviction here presents itself can only be understood by a reference to certain deeply fixed impulses and feelings connected with, the very consciousness of self, and favouring what I have marked off as active illusion. I shall try to show very briefly that each man's intuitive persuasion of his own powers, gifts, or importance--in brief, of his own particular value, contains, from the first, a palpable ingredient of active illusion.

Most persons, one supposes, have with more or less distinct consciousness framed a notion of their own value, if not to the world generally, at least to themselves. And this notion, however undefined it may be, is held to with a singular tenacity of belief. The greater part of mankind, indeed, seem never to entertain the question whether they really possess points of excellence. They a.s.sume it as a matter perfectly self-evident, and appear to believe in their vaguely conceived worth on the same immediate testimony of consciousness by which they a.s.sure themselves of their personal existence. Indeed, the conviction of personal consequence may be said to be a constant factor in most men's consciousness. However restrained by the rules of polite intercourse, it betrays its existence and its energy in innumerable ways. It displays itself most triumphantly when the mind is suddenly isolated from other minds, when other men unite in heaping neglect and contempt on the believer's head. In these moments he proves an almost heroic strength of confidence, believing in himself and in his claims to careful consideration when all his acquaintance are practically avowing their disbelief.

The intensity of this belief in personal value may be observed in very different forms. The young woman who, quite independently of others'

opinion, and even in defiance of it, cherishes a conviction that her external attractions have a considerable value; the young man who, in the face of general indifference, persists in his habit of voluble talk on the supposition that he is conferring on his fellow-creatures the fruits of profound wisdom; and the man of years whose opinion of his own social importance and moral worth is quite disproportionate to the estimation which others form of his claims--these alike ill.u.s.trate the force and pertinacity of the belief.

There are, no doubt, many exceptions to this form of self-appreciation.

In certain robust minds, but little given to self-reflection, the idea of personal value rarely occurs. And then there are timid, sensitive natures that betray a tendency to self-distrust of all kinds, and to an undue depreciation of personal merit. Yet even here traces of an impulse to think well of self will appear to the attentive eye, and one can generally recognize that this impulse is only kept down by some other stronger force, as, for example, extreme sensitiveness to the judgment of others, great conscientiousness, and so on. And however this be, it will be allowed that the average man rates himself highly.

It is to be noticed that this persuasion of personal value or excellence is, in common, very vague. A man may have a general sense of his own importance without in the least being able to say wherein exactly his superiority lies. Or, to put it another way, he may have a strong conviction that he stands high in the scale of morally deserving persons, and yet be unable to define his position more nearly. Commonly, the conviction seems to be only definable as an a.s.surance of a superlative of which the positive and comparative are suppressed. At most, his idea of his moral alt.i.tude resolves itself into the proposition, "I am a good deal better than Mr. A. or Mr. B." Now, it is plain that in these intuitive judgments on his own excellence, the man is making an a.s.sertion with respect, not only to inner subjective feelings which he only can be supposed to know immediately, but also to external objective facts which are patent to others, namely, to certain active tendencies and capabilities, to the direction of external conduct in certain lines.[143] Hence, if the a.s.sertion is erroneous, it will be in plain contradiction to others' perceptions of his powers or moral endowments. And this is what we actually find. A man's self-esteem, in a large preponderance of cases, is plainly in excess of others' esteem of him. What the man conceives himself to be differs widely from what others conceive him to be.

"Oh wad some power the giftie gie us, To see oursels as others see us!"

Now, whence comes this large and approximately uniform discrepancy between our self-esteem and others' esteem of us? By trying to answer this question we shall come to understand still better the processes by which the most powerful forms of illusion are generated.

It is, I think, a matter of every-day observation that children manifest an apparently instinctive disposition to magnify self as soon as the vaguest idea of self is reached. It is very hard to define this feeling more precisely than by terming it a rudimentary sense of personal importance. It may show itself in very different ways, taking now a more active form, as an impulse of self-a.s.sertion, and a desire to enforce one's own will to the suppression of others' wills, and at another time wearing the appearance of a pa.s.sive emotion, an elementary form of _amour propre_. And it is this feeling which forms the germ of the self-estimation of adults. For in truth all attribution of value involves an element of feeling, as respect, and of active desire, and the ascription of value to one's self is in its simplest form merely the expression of this state of mind.