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To the sense-impression which his eye now gives him, he adds something which past experience has bequeathed to his mind. In perception, the material of sensation is acted on by the mind, which embodies in its present attitude all the results of its past growth. Let us look at this process of synthesis a little more closely.
While resolving the secondary qualities of light, sound, etc., into modes of motion, while representing the object very differently from the unscientific mind, he agrees with this in holding to the reality of something external, regarding this as antecedent to and therefore as independent of the particular mind which receives the sense-impression.
And coupled with this glimmering sense-impression, he felt the drive of water over him; he saw, vaguely as in the memory of a dream, a dim gray light that weakly filtered through the gloom. Weak, sick, dazed, the man realized that he still lived; and to his mind the thought "Beatrice!" flashed back again.
The explanation of this deeply rooted tendency to a slightly illusory view of our mental states is, I think, an easy one. For one thing, it follows from the relation of the mental image to the sense-impression that we should tend to assimilate the former to the latter as to its nature and origin.
To recall an object to the mind is to reconstruct the percept in the absence of a sense-impression. An act of memory is obviously distinguished from one of simple imagination by the presence of a conscious reference to the past. Every recollection is an immediate reapprehension of some past object or event.
In this way we impose on ourselves, disguising our real sentiments by a thin veil of make-believe. It is to be observed, however, that the confusing of elements of consciousness, which is so prominent a factor in introspective illusion, involves a species of error closely analogous to a complete illusion of perception, that is to say, one which involves a misinterpretation of a sense-impression.
From this short account of the process of insight, its relation to perception and introspection becomes pretty plain. On the one hand, it closely resembles sense-perception, since it proceeds by the interpretation of a sense-impression by means of a representative image.
Thus, for example, the taking of the two points of a pair of compasses for one, where the closest attention does not discover the error, is best regarded as arising, not from a confusion of the sense-impression, but from a wrong interpretation of a sensation, occasioned by an overlooking of the limits of local discriminative sensibility. Misinterpretation of the Sense-Impression.
Every reader will easily call to mind dream experiences of this character, in which the long-delayed dénouement was suggested and prepared for by some extraneous sense-impression, showing that the entire dream drama unfolded within the time it took that impression to travel from the skin to the brain.
According to the researches of the Ecole Polytechnique, in Paris no doubt you, yourself, have studied there, n'est-ce pas? vibration of the first octave from 2 to 8 per second, give us no sense-impression. From the fourth to the fifteenth octave, 16 to 32,768 per second, we get sound. The qualities of the 16th to the 24th are or have been, until I investigated quite unknown.
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