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Mike's irises had dilated to the point that he could see the dim dot in the center of the target circle, glowing like a dimly visible star. "Shoot," he said. There was a dazzling glare of light. Mike pulled his face out of the padded opening and blinked away the colored after-images. Lieutenant Nariaki was comparing the fresh fingerprints with the set he had had on file.
But when the three minutes had been filled with an effort to remember some of the funny pictures and to write down their salient points, all the mental after-images of the pages had faded away, and a true memory picture was to be produced.
Goethe, however, at once adds that although this explanation may seem adequate for this special instance, there are other phenomena which can be accounted for only if they are held to derive from a 'higher source'. Goethe means experiences with coloured after-images. This will be confirmed by our own discussion of the subject.
Following the lines of our treatment of after-images in the last chapter, we will next inquire into the anatomical and physiological basis of the two opposite sight-activities. In the previous instance we found this in the polarity of nerve and blood. This time we must look for it in a certain twofold structure of the eye itself.
Of these two, seeing in dream is in a certain sense the purer form of inner seeing in that it arises without any outer stimulus exercised upon the physical organ of sight. On the other hand, it lacks that objective conformity to law characteristic of the after-images which mirror the order of the external world.
What the rationalist calls nonentity is the substrate and locus of all ideas, having the obstinate reality of matter, the crushing irrationality of existence itself; and one who attempts to override it becomes to that extent an irrelevant rhapsodist, dealing with thin after-images of being. Nor has the mystic who sinks into the immediate much better appreciated the situation.
Since Goethe did not judge man from artificially devised experiments, but the latter from man, quite simple reflexions led him to the following view of the presence of the contrasting colour in the coloured after-images.
Frazer gives a thoroughly modern doctrine of visual and auditory hallucinations, as revived impressions of sense. The impressions, 'laid up in the brain, will be reversed back to the retiform coat and crystalline humour, hence 'a lively seeing, as if, de novo, the object had been placed before the eye'. He illustrates this by experiments in after-images.
Perception of the after-images thus turns into what we may call perception of simultaneous images. These two forms of visual perception which we may briefly call: perception of post-images, and perception of co-images represent successive rungs on a 'spiritual ladder' pointing beyond themselves to a further rung.
To myself it rather looks as if all impressions had their nunuai, real, bodiless, persistent, after-images; that the soul is the complex of all of these nunuai; that there is in the universe a kind of magical other, called mana, possessed, in different proportions, by different men, Vui, tamate, and material objects, and that the atai or ataro of a man dead, his ghost, retains its old, and acquires new mana.
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