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Updated: May 18, 2025
Confusion of the Sense-Impression. The most interesting case of such an error is where the impression is unfamiliar and novel in character. I have already remarked that in the mental life of the adult perfectly new sensations never occur. At the same time, comparatively novel impressions sometimes arise.
This cannot be better defined, perhaps, than by saying that it is the mind's immediate reflective cognition of its own states as such. In one sense, of course, everything we know may be called a mental state, actual or imagined. Thus, a sense-impression is known, exactly like any other feeling of the mind, as a mental phenomenon or mental modification.
They broadly answer to the slight errors connected with the discrimination and recognition of the sense-impression. There is nothing answering to a complete hallucination in the sphere of the inner mental life.
Even in the case of familiar external impressions, such as the sound of the striking of a clock, there appears to be wanting that simple process of reaction by which, in a waking condition of the attention, a sense-impression is instantly discriminated and classed.
Another thing worth noting with respect to this process of filling up a sense-impression is that it draws on past sensations of the eye itself.
These considerations help us to explain the coalescence of the retinal impressions and its limits, the fusion of partial tones, and so on. It is plain that this fusion of sensations, whatever its exact conditions may be, gives rise to error or wrong interpretation of the sense-impression.
The sense-impression that you call touch was just as much as sight felt only at the brain end of a sensory nerve. What has told you also of the nerve from the tip of your finger to your brain? Why, sense-impressions also, messages conveyed along optic or tactile sensory nerves.
For the automatic excitation of the centres would pretty certainly issue in the semblance of some definite, familiar variety of sense-impression which, moreover, as a part of a complex state known as a percept, would instantly present itself as a completely formed quasi-percept.
Our two hands, moreover, will receive the same sense-impression from the tepid water, if we keep them in it long enough. Seen in this light, the original experiment, designed to show the subjective character of the impressions gained through the sense of warmth, reveals itself as a piece of self-deception by the onlooker-consciousness.
If, however, the reader will recall what was said in an earlier chapter about the possibility of error in recognizing the quality of a sense-impression, he will be prepared for a similar possibility here. What we are accustomed to call a purely presentative cognition is, in truth, partly representative.
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