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Sensation, moreover, is not indefinitely sustained, as anyone may learn who will follow the ticking of a watch for five minutes continuously. But quite apart from the sense and range of our perceptions, the equality of a sense-impression is found to vary with different persons, affecting them each in a different way.
Enough has been said, perhaps, about those errors of perception which have their root in the initial process of sensation. We may now pass to the far more important class of illusions which are related to the later stages of perception, that is to say, the process of interpreting the sense-impression. Speaking generally, one may describe an illusion of perception as a misinterpretation.
On the other hand, a man experiences the illusion of seeing spectres of familiar objects just after exciting his imagination over a ghost-story, because the mind is strongly predisposed to frame this kind of percept. The first class of illusions arises from without, the sense-impression being the starting-point, and the process of preperception being controlled by this.
"Try to force some sense-impression to his brain. It is sleep, but it is more than that. The best experiment for any doubting Thomas to employ is just to waken this guard if possible." Bohannan shook his head. "No," he answered, "I'm not going to make a fool of myself. There's no going against any of your statements. I'm beginning to find that out, definitely. Let's be on our way!"
The immediate sense-impression is just as far removed from what you term the 'outside world' as the store of impresses. If our telephone clerk had recorded by aid of a phonograph certain of the messages from the outside world on past occasions, then if any telephonic message on its receipt set several phonographs repeating past messages, we have an image analogous to what goes on in the brain.
"Object lessons" tended to isolate the mere sense-activity and make it an end in itself. The more isolated the object, the more isolated the sensory quality, the more distinct the sense-impression as a unit of knowledge.
That takes cognisance only of vibrations and the conditions of vibration in elastic bodies, which, by means of the ear and the nerves of hearing, become a stimulus of consciousness. Consciousness “responds” to this stimulus by receiving a sense-impression of hearing. But in this, obviously, there is nothing of the nature of oscillations and vibrations, but something quite different.
The Higher Planes of Nature In view of the facts and principles above set forth and considered, we may begin to see that there is nothing "unnatural" in the hypothesis that there may be reports conveyed to the consciousness of man by means of higher vibrations than those of ordinary sound, or ordinary sight, providing that man has either highly developed his ordinary senses of sight, hearing, or touch to a degree sufficiently high to register these higher vibrations; or else has evolved and unfolded into consciousness certain latent faculties of sense-impression which are lying dormant in the great masses of mankind.
It is thus that in modern philosophy, and finally in ordinary modern usage, 'idea' came to be a word with many meanings. Sometimes it signifies a sense-impression, sometimes a mental representation, sometimes the thought, concept or essential nature of a thing.
If I permit a concrete, scientific reaction, I must acknowledge the source to be a passing bug, a giant bug, related distantly to our malodorous northern squash-bug, but emitting a scent as different as orchids' breath from grocery garlic. But I accept this delicate volatility as simply another pastel-soft sense-impression as an earnest of the worthy, smelly things of old jungles.
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