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Now, it is to be noted that the process of preperception will be greatly aided by any circumstance that facilitates the construction of the particular interpretative image required. Thus, the more frequently a similar process of perception has been performed in the past, the more ready will the mind be to fall into the particular way of interpreting the impression.
The process of preperception may be shortened, not only by means of a permanent disposition to frame the required interpretative scheme, the residuum of past like processes, but also by means of any temporary disposition pointing in the same direction.
Or the process of independent preperception may go on apart from our volitions, and perhaps in spite of these, in which case the illusion has something of the irresistible necessity of a passive illusion. Let us consider separately each mode of production. Voluntary Selection of Interpretation.
The expediting of the process of preperception in those cases where it has frequently been performed before, is clearly an illustration of the organic law that every function is improved by exercise.
Sometimes the meaning of an impression flashes on us at once, and the stage of preperception becomes evanescent. At other times the same impression will fail for an appreciable interval to divulge its meaning.
In these cases attention is no longer free, but fettered, only it is now fettered rather from within than from without; that is to say, the dominating preperception is much more the result of an independent bent of the imagination than of some suggestion forced on the mind by the actual impression of the moment. Involuntary Mental Preadjustment.
The second class arises rather from within, from an independent or spontaneous activity of the imagination. In the one case the mind is comparatively passive; in the other it is active, energetically reacting on the impression, and impatiently anticipating the result of the normal process of preperception. Hence I shall, for brevity's sake, commonly speak of them as Passive and Active Illusions.
If a wrong mental image happens to have been formed and vividly entertained, and if the actual impression fits in to a certain extent with this independently formed preperception, we may have a fusion of the two which exactly simulates the form of a complete percept.
In all such cases the process of preperception connected with a given impression is effected more or less completely by the suggestions of other and related impressions. It follows from all that has been just said that our minds are never in exactly the same state of readiness with respect to a particular process of perceptional interpretation.
And here it is easy to distinguish the two stages of preperception and perception. The interpretative image is slowly built up by the operation of suggestion, at the close of which the impression is suddenly illumined as by a flash of light, and takes a definite, precise shape.
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