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In the light of our previous studies we shall not find it difficult to test the reality-value of the thermodynamic conception of heat. As we know of mass through a definite sense-perception, so we know of heat. In the latter case we rely on the sense of warmth. Still, one-eyed, colour-blind observation is naturally unable to take account of these sense-messages.
The reason is that there is always a dual process at work in mind: there is the sense-perception of the actual sound, and a brain-recognition of its meaning. This latter must be supplied by the hearer himself from his own imagination or experience. The non-musical multitude has neither, and is therefore unable to complete this second process of recognition.
Now in the sporadic appearance of etheric sight in the savage, whether of Central Africa or of Western Europe, it has been observed that the corresponding nervous disturbance is almost entirely in the sympathetic system, and that the whole affair is practically beyond the man's control is in fact a sort of massive sensation vaguely belonging to the whole etheric body, rather than an exact and definite sense-perception communicated through a specialized organ.
And just as there is this anticipation of dream-hallucination in the presomnial condition, so there is the survival of it in the postsomnial condition. As I have observed, dreams sometimes leave behind them, for an appreciable interval after waking, a vivid after-impression, and in some cases even the semblance of a sense-perception.
It is said by certain, philosophers that perception, as a whole, is an illusion, inasmuch as it involves the fiction of a real thing independent of mind, yet somehow present to it in the act of sense-perception. But this is a question for philosophy, not for science.
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.
From this short account of the process of insight, its relation to perception and introspection becomes pretty plain. On the one hand, it closely resembles sense-perception, since it proceeds by the interpretation of a sense-impression by means of a representative image.
And yet this side of combustion, first observed by J. Priestley , is neither the one for the sake of which man produces combustion in the service of his everyday life, nor is it at all observed by ordinary sense-perception. Nevertheless, to describe the obvious fact, that combustion is liberation of heat from the combustible substance, will hardly occur to anyone to-day.
The Greek philosopher had ascribed the final synthesis of knowledge to a superhuman force. Philo ascribes to God all the intermediate steps from sense-perception. It may be admitted that his passive notion of philosophy involves the abandonment of the Greek ideal, the eager searching of Plato after truth.
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.
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