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Updated: May 27, 2025
I referred at the beginning of this account of sense-illusions to the readiness with which the mind deceives itself with respect to the nature and causes of the vague sensations which usually form the dim background of our mental life.
These observations naturally conduct us to the consideration of the second great group of sense-illusions, which I have marked off as active illusions, where the action of a pre-existing intellectual disposition becomes much more clearly marked, and assumes the form of a free imaginative transformation of reality. ILLUSIONS OF PERCEPTION continued. B. Active Illusions.
And it is exceedingly curious to notice the different directions which patients give to these sounds, referring them now to a quarter above the head, now to a region below the floor, and so on. Range of Sense-Illusions. And now let us glance back to see the path we have traversed.
Heidenhain describes, might, indeed, easily prove a very serious want of "adaptation of internal to external relations," whereas a tendency to dreaming would hardly prove a maladaptation at all. We have now, perhaps, sufficiently reviewed sense-illusions, both of waking life and of sleep.
Our next step, then, would appear to be to determine these differences in the mode of production. That there are differences in the origin and source of illusion is a fact which has been fully recognized by those writers who have made a special study of sense-illusions. By these the term illusion is commonly employed in a narrow, technical sense, and opposed to hallucination.
However irresistible our sense-illusions may be, so long as we are under the sway of particular impressions or mental images, we can, when resolved to do so, undeceive ourselves by carefully attending to the actual state of things about us. And in many cases, when once the correction is made, the illusion seems an impossibility.
They are sometimes called deceptions of the senses; but this is a somewhat loose expression, suggesting that we can be deceived as to sensation itself, though, as we shall see later on, this is only true in a very restricted meaning of the phrase. To speak correctly, sense-illusions must be said to arise by a simulation of the form of just and accurate perceptions.
So long as a particular bodily posture is assumed, so long does the corresponding illusion endure. One result of this, in connection with that impairing of sensibility already referred to, is the scope for a curious overriding of sense-impressions by the dominant illusory percept, a process that we have seen illustrated in the active sense-illusions of waking life.
While in the following examination of sense-illusions we put out of sight what certain philosophers say about the illusoriness of perception as a whole, we shall also do well to leave out of account what physical science is sometimes supposed to tell us respecting a constant element of illusion in perception.
They thus answer in a measure to the first variety of organically conditioned illusions, namely, those connected with the limits of sensibility. On the other hand, the active illusions, being essentially individual or subjective, may be said to correspond to the other variety of this class those connected with variations of sensibility. Our scheme of sense-illusions is now complete.
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