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All that I shall attempt here is to show that it does not do this any more than the risk of sense-illusion can be said materially to affect the value of external observation. It is to be noted first of all that the errors of introspection are much more limited than those of sense-perception.
Or, if we take the meaning of the word common to include both the universal as contrasted with the individual experience, and the permanent, constant, or average, as distinguished from the momentary and variable percept, we may still briefly describe an illusion of perception as a deviation from the common or collective experience. Sources of Sense-Illusion.
For example, the conviction in the act of perception that something external to the mind and independent of it exists, has a certain superficial resemblance to an hallucination of sense; and moreover, the associationist seeks to explain it by means of these very processes which underlie what is recognized by all as sense-illusion.
Understanding sense-illusion in this way, let us glance back at the process of perception in its several stages or aspects, with the object of discovering what room occurs for illusion. It appears at first as if the preliminary stages the reception, discrimination, and classification of an impression would not offer the slightest opening for error.
It is plain, then, that in the study of illusion, where the indirectly known elements are the thing to be considered, the eye, and after this the ear, will mostly engage our attention. So much it seemed needful to say about the mechanism of perception, in order to understand the slight disturbances of this mechanism that manifest themselves in sense-illusion.
In concluding this account of dreams, I would call attention to the importance of the transition states between sleeping and waking, in relation to the production of sense-illusion. And this point may be touched on here all the more appropriately, since it helps to bring out the close relation between waking and sleeping illusion.
The name "vision," given by old writers to dreams, sufficiently points out this close affinity of the mental phenomena to sense-perception; and so far as science is concerned, they must be regarded as a peculiar variety of sense-illusion. Hence the appropriateness of studying them in close connection with the illusions of perception of the waking state.
This subject will be touched on again under the Illusions of Belief. Here I am concerned to point out that such presentiments are fertile sources of sense-illusion. The history of Church miracles, visions, and the like amply illustrates the effect of a vivid anticipation in falsifying the perceptions of external things.
A mirage offers another instance of a sense-illusion; but in it the cause is objective. The deception may be but momentary, as when Macbeth is stealing on tiptoe to the chamber of his guest to murder him. His mind is disturbed by the imagination of the horrid deed he is about to perpetrate.
And here we are compelled to inquire at the outset if anything analogous to sense-illusion is to be found in that other great region of presentative cognition usually marked off from external perception as internal perception, self-reflection, or introspection. Illusions of Introspection defined. This inquiry naturally sets out with the question: What is meant by introspection?
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