OTHER QUASI-PRESENTATIVE ILLUSIONS: ERRORS OF INSIGHT.
Besides the perception of external objects, and the inspection of our
internal mental states, there are other forms of quasi-presentative
cognition which need to be touched on here, inasmuch as they are
sometimes erroneous and illusory.
In the last chapter I alluded to the fact that emotion may arise as the
immediate accompaniment of a sense-impression. When this is the case
there is a disposition to read into the external object a quality
answering to the emotion, just as there is a disposition to ascribe to
objects qualities of heat and cold answering to the sensations thus
called. And such a reference of an emotional result to an external
exciting cause approximates in character to an immediate intuition. The
cognition of the quality is instantaneous, and quite free from any
admixture of conscious inference. Accordingly, we have to inquire into
the illusory forms of such intuition, if such there be.
_Æsthetic Intuition._
Conspicuous among these quasi-presentative emotional cognitions is
æsthetic intuition, that is to say, the perception of an object as
beautiful. It is not necessary here to raise the question whether there
is, strictly speaking, any quality in things answering to the sentiment
of beauty in our minds: this is a philosophical and not a psychological
question, and turns on the further question, what we mean by object. All
that we need to assume here is that there are certain aspects of
external things, certain relations of form, together with a power of
exciting certain pleasurable ideas in the spectator's mind, which are
commonly recognized as the cause of the emotion of beauty, and indeed
regarded as constituting the embodiments of the objective quality,
beauty. Æsthetic intuition thus clearly implies the immediate assurance
of the existence of a common source of æsthetic delight, a source bound
up with an object of common sense-perception. And so we may say that to
call a thing beautiful is more or less distinctly to recognize it as a
cause of a present emotion, and to attribute to it a power of raising a
kindred emotion in other minds.
_Æsthetic Illusion._
According to this view of the matter, an illusion of æsthetic intuition
would arise whenever this power of affecting a number of minds
pleasurably is wrongly attributed, by an act of "intuition," to an
object of sense-perception, on the ground of a present personal
feeling.
Now, this error is by no means unfrequent. Our delight in viewing
external things, though agreeing up to a certain point, does not agree
throughout. It is a trite remark that there is a large individual
factor, a considerable "personal equation," in matters of taste, as in
other matters. Permanent differences of natural sensibility, of
experience, of intellectual habits, and so on, make an object
æsthetically impressive and valuable to one man and not to another. Yet
these differences tend to be overlooked. The individual mind, filled
with delight at some spectacle, automatically projects its feeling
outwards in the shape of a cause of a common sentiment. And the force of
this impulse cannot be altogether explained as the effect of past
experiences and of association. It seems to involve, in addition, the
play of social instincts, the impulse of the individual mind to connect
itself in sympathy with the collective mind.
Here, as in the other varieties of illusion already treated of, we may
distinguish between a passive and an active side; only in this case the
passive side must not be taken as corresponding to any common
suggestions of the object, as in the case of perception proper. So far
as an illusion of æsthetic intuition may be considered as passive, it
must be due to the effect of circumscribed individual associations with
the object.
All agree that what is called beauty consists, to a considerable extent,
of a power of awaking pleasant suggestions, but in order that these
should constitute a ground of æsthetic value, they must be common,
participated in by all, or at least by an indefinite number. This will
be the case when the association rests on our common every-day
experiences, and our common knowledge of things, as in the case of the
peaceful beauty of an ascending curl of blue smoke in a woody landscape,
or the awful beauty of a lofty precipice. On the other hand, when the
experience and recollections, which are the source of the pleasure, are
restricted and accidental, any attribution of objective worth is
illusory. Thus, the ascription of beauty to one's native village, to
one's beloved friends, and so on, in so far as it carries the conviction
of objective worth, may imply a confusion of the individual with the
common experience.
The active side of this species of illusions would be illustrated in
every instance of ascribing beauty to objects which is due, in a
considerable measure at least, to some pre-existing disposition in the
mind, whether permanent or temporary. A man brings his peculiar habits
of thought and feeling to the contemplation of objects, and the æsthetic
impression produced is coloured by these predispositions. Thus, a person
of a sad and gloomy cast of mind will be disposed to see a sombre beauty
where other eyes see nothing of the kind. And then there are all the
effects of temporary conditions of the imagination and the feelings.
Thus, the individual mind may be focussed in a certain way through the
suggestion of another. People not seldom see a thing to be beautiful
because they are told that it is so. It might not be well to inquire too
curiously how many of the frequenters of the annual art exhibitions use
their own eyes in framing their æsthetic judgments. Or the temporary
predisposition may reside in a purely personal feeling or desire
uppermost at the time. Our enjoyment of nature or of art is coloured by
our temporary mood. There are moments of exceptional mental
exhilaration, when even a commonplace scene will excite an appreciable
kind of admiration. Or there may be a strong wish to find a thing
beautiful begotten of another feeling. Thus, a lover desires to find
beauty in his mistress; or, having found it in her face and form,
desires to find a harmonious beauty in her mind. In these different ways
temporary accidents of personal feeling and imagination enter into and
determine our æsthetic intuition, making it deviate from the common
standard. This kind of error may even approximate in character to an
hallucination of sense when there is nothing answering to a common
source of æsthetic pleasure. Thus, the fond mother, through the very
force of her affection, will construct a beauty in her child, which for
others is altogether non-existent.
What applies to the perception of beauty in the narrow sense will apply
to all other modes of æsthetic intuition, as that of the sublime and the
ludicrous, and the recognition of the opposite of beauty or the ugly. In
like manner, it will apply to moral intuition in so far as it is an
instantaneous recognition of a certain quality in a perceived action
based on, or at least conjoined with, a particular emotional effect. In
men's intuitive judgments respecting the right and the wrong, the noble
and base, the admirable and contemptible, and so on, we may see the same
kind of illusory universalizing of personal feeling as we have seen in
their judgments respecting the beautiful. And the sources of the error
are the same in the two cases. Accidents of experience, giving special
associations to the actions, will not unfrequently warp the individual
intuition. Ethical culture, like æsthetic culture, means a continual
casting aside of early illusory habits of intuition. And further, moral
intuition illustrates all those effects of feeling which we have briefly
traced in the case of æsthetic intuition. The perversions of the moral
intuition under the sway of prejudice are too familiar to need more than
a bare allusion.
_Nature of Insight._
There remains one further mode of cognition which approximates in
character to presentative knowledge, and is closely related to external
perception. I refer to the commonly called "intuitive" process by which
we apprehend the feelings and thoughts of other minds through the
external signs of movement, vocal sound, etc., which make up expression
and language. This kind of knowledge, which is not sufficiently marked
off from external perception on the one side and introspection on the
other, I venture to call Insight.
I am well aware that this interpretation of the mental states of others
is commonly described as a process of inference involving a conscious
reference to our own similar experiences. I willingly grant that it is
often so. At the same time, it must be perfectly plain that it is not
always so. It is, indeed, doubtful whether in its first stages in early
life it is invariably so, for there seem to be good reasons for
attributing to the infant mind a certain degree of instinctive or
inherited capability in making out the looks and tones of others.[107]
And, however this may be, it is certain that with the progress of life a
good part of this interpretation comes to be automatic or unconscious,
approximating in character to a sense-perception. To recognize
contentment in a placid smile is, one would say, hardly less immediate
and intuitive than to recognize the coolness of a stream.
We must, of course, all allow that the fusion of the presentative and
the representative element is, speaking generally, more complete in the
case of sense-perception than in that here considered. In spite of
Berkeley's masterly account of the _rationale_ of visual perception as
an interpretation of "visual language" and all that has confirmed it,
the plain man cannot, at the moment of looking at an object, easily
bring himself to admit that distance is not directly present to his
vision. On the other hand, on cool reflection, he will recognize that
the complacent benevolent sentiment is distinct from the particular
movements and changes in the eye and other features which express it.
Yet, while admitting this, I must contend that there is no very hard and
fast line dividing the two processes, but that the reading of others'
feelings approximates in character to an act of perception.
An intuitive insight may, then, be defined as that instantaneous,
automatic, or "unconscious" mode of interpreting another's feeling
which occurs whenever the feeling is fully expressed, and when its signs
are sufficiently familiar to us. This definition will include the
interpretation of thoughts by means of language, though not, of course,
the belief in an objective fact grounded on a recognition of another's
belief. On the other hand, it will exclude all the more complex
interpretations of looks and words which imply conscious comparison,
reflection, and reasoning. Further, it will exclude a large part of the
interpretation of actions as motived, since this, though sometimes
approaching the intuitive form, is for the most part a process of
conjectural or doubtful inference, and wanting in the immediate
assurance which belongs to an intuitive reading of a present emotion or
thought.
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.
On the other hand, it differs from sense-perception, and is more closely
allied to introspection in the fact that, while the process of
interpretation in the former case is a reconstruction of _external_
experiences, in the latter case it is a reconstruction of _internal_
experiences. To intuit another's feeling is clearly to represent to
ourselves a certain kind of internal experience previously known, in its
elements at least, by introspection, while these represented experiences
are distinctly referred to another personality.
And now we see what constitutes the object of insight. This is, in part,
a common experience, as in the case of sense-perception and æsthetic
intuition, since to perceive another's feeling is implicitly to cognize
the external conditions of a common insight. But this is clearly not the
whole, nor even the main part of objective reality in this act of
cognition. An intuitive insight differs from a sense-perception in that
it involves an immediate assurance of the existence of a feeling
presentatively known, though not to our own minds. The object in insight
is thus a presentative feeling as in introspection, though not our own,
but another's. And so it differs from the object in sense-perception in
so far as this last involves sense-experiences, as muscular and tactual
feelings, which are not _at the moment_ presentatively known to any
mind.
_Illusions of Insight._
And now we are in a position, perhaps, to define an illusion of insight,
and to inquire whether there is anything answering to our definition. An
illusory insight is a quasi-intuition of another's feelings which does
not answer to the internal reality as presentatively known to the
subject himself. In spite of the errors of introspection dealt with in
the last chapter, nobody will doubt that, when it is a question between
a man's knowing what is at the moment in his own mind and somebody
else's knowing, logic, as well as politeness, requires us to give
precedence to the former.
An illusion of insight, like the other varieties of illusion already
dealt with, may arise either by way of wrong suggestion or by way of a
warping preconception. Let us look at each of these sources apart.
Our insights, like our perceptions, though intuitive in form, are
obviously determined by previous experience, association, and habit.
Hence, on its passive side, an illusion of insight may be described as a
wrong interpretation of a new or exceptional case. For example, having
associated the representation of a slight feeling of astonishment with
uplifted eyebrows, we irresistibly tend to see a face in which this is a
constant feature as expressing this particular shade of emotion. In this
way we sometimes fall into grotesque errors as to mental traits. And the
most practised physiognomist may not unfrequently err by importing the
results of his special circle of experiences into new and unlike cases.
Much the same thing occurs in language. Our timbre of voice, our
articulation, and our vocabulary, like our physiognomy, have about them
something individual, and error often arises from overlooking this, and
hastily reading common interpretations into exceptional cases. The
misunderstandings that arise even among the most open and confiding
friends sufficiently illustrate this liability to error.
Sometimes the error becomes more palpable, as, for example, when we
visit another country. A foreign language, when heard, provokingly
suggests all kinds of absurd meanings through analogies to our familiar
tongue. Thus, the Englishman who visits Germany cannot, for a time, hear
a lady use the expression, "Mein Mann," without having the amusing
suggestion that the speaker is wishing to call special attention to the
fact of her husband's masculinity. And doubtless the German who visits
us derives a similar kind of amusement from such involuntary
comparisons.
A fertile source of illusory insight is, of course, conscious deception
on the part of others. The rules of polite society require us to be
hypocrites in a small way, and we have occasionally to affect the signs
of amiability, interest, and amusement, when our actual sentiment is one
of indifference, weariness, or even positive antipathy. And in this way
a good deal of petty illusion arises. Although we may be well aware of
the general untrustworthiness of this society behaviour, such is the
force of association and habit, that the bland tone and flattering word
irresistibly excite a momentary feeling of gratification, an effect
which is made all the more easy by the co-operation of the recipient's
own wishes, touched on in the last chapter.
Among all varieties of this deception, that of the stage is the most
complete. The actor is a man who has elaborately trained himself in the
simulation of certain feelings. And when his acting is of the best
quality, and the proper bodily attitude, gesture, tone of voice, and so
on, are hit off, the force of the illusion completely masters us. For
the moment we lose sight of the theatrical surroundings, and see the
actor as really carried away by the passion which he so closely
imitates. Histrionic illusion is as complete as any artistic variety can
venture to be.[108]
I have said that our insights are limited by our own mental experience,
and so by introspection. In truth, every interpretation of another's
look and word is determined ultimately, not by what we have previously
observed in others, but by what we have personally felt, or at least
have in a sense made our own by intense sympathy. Hence we may, in
general, regard an illusion of insight on the active side as a hasty
projection of our own feelings, thoughts, etc., into other minds.
We habitually approach others with a predisposition to attribute to them
our own modes of thinking and feeling. And this predisposition will be
the more powerful, the more desirous we are for sympathy, and for that
confirmation of our own views which the reflection of another mind
affords. Thus, when making a new acquaintance, people are in general
disposed to project too much of themselves into the person who is the
object of inspection. They intuitively endow him with their own ideas,
ways of looking at things, prejudices of sentiment, and so on, and
receive something like a shock when later on they find out how different
he is from this first hastily formed and largely performed image.
The same thing occurs in the reading of literature, and the appreciation
of the arts of expression generally. We usually approach an author with
a predisposition to read our own habits of thought and sentiment into
his words. It is probably a characteristic defect of a good deal of
current criticism of remote writers to attribute to them too much of our
modern conceptions and aims. Similarly, we often import our own special
feelings into the utterances of the poet and of the musical composer.
That much of this intuition is illusory, may be seen by a little
attention to the "intuitions" of different critics. Two readers of
unlike emotional organization will find incompatible modes of feeling in
the same poet. And everybody knows how common it is for musical critics
and amateurs to discover quite dissimilar feelings in the same
composition.[109]
The effect of this active projection of personal feeling will, of
course, be seen most strikingly when there is a certain variety of
feeling actually excited at the time in the observer's mind. A man who
is in a particularly happy mood tends to reflect his exuberant gladness
on others. The lover, in the moment of exalted emotion, reads a response
to all his aspirations in his mistress's eyes. Again, a man will tend to
project his own present ideas into the minds of others, and so imagine
that they know what he knows; and this sometimes leads to a comical kind
of embarrassment, and even to a betrayal of something which it was the
interest of the person to keep to himself. Once more, in interpreting
language, we may sometimes catch ourselves mistaking the meaning, owing
to the presence of a certain idea in the mind at the time. Thus, if I
have just been thinking of Comte, and overhear a person exclaim, "I'm
positive," I irresistibly tend, for the moment, to ascribe to him an
avowal of discipleship to the great positivist.
_Poetic Illusion._
The most remarkable example of this projection of feeling is
undoubtedly illustrated in the poetic interpretation of inanimate
nature. The personification of tree, mountain, ocean, and so on,
illustrates, no doubt, the effect of association and external
suggestion; for there are limits to such personification. But
resemblance and suggestion commonly bear, in this case, but a small
proportion to active constructive imagination. One might, perhaps, call
this kind of projection the hallucination of insight, since there is
nothing objective corresponding to the interpretative image.
The imaginative and poetic mind is continually on the look out for hints
of life, consciousness, and emotion in nature. It finds a certain kind
of satisfaction in this half-illusory, dream-like transformation of
nature. The deepest ground of this tendency must probably be looked for
in the primitive ideas of the race, and the transmission by inheritance
of the effect of its firmly fixed habits of mind. The undisciplined mind
of early man, incapable of distinguishing the object of perception from
the product of spontaneous imagination, and taking his own double
existence as the type of all existence, actually saw the stream, the
ocean, and the mountain as living beings; and so firmly rooted is this
way of regarding objects, that even our scientifically trained minds
find it a relief to relapse occasionally into it.[110]
While there is this general imaginative disposition in the poetic mind
to endow nature with life and consciousness, there are special
tendencies to project the individual feelings into objects. Every
imaginative mind looks for reflections of its own deepest feelings in
the world about it. The lonely embittered heart, craving for sympathy,
which he cannot meet with in his fellow-man, finds traces of it in the
sighing of the trees or the moaning of the sad sea-wave. Our Poet
Laureate, in his great elegy, has abundantly illustrated this impulse of
the imagination to reflect its own emotional colouring on to inanimate
things: for example in the lines--
"The wild unrest that lives in woe
Would dote and pore on yonder cloud
That rises upward always higher,
And onward drags a labouring breast,
And topples round the dreary west,
A looming bastion fringed with fire."
So far I have been considering active illusions of insight as arising
through the play of the impulse of the individual mind to project its
feelings outwards, or to see their reflections in external things. I
must now add that active illusion may be due to causes similar to those
which we have seen to operate in the sphere of illusory perception and
introspection. That is to say, there may be a disposition, permanent or
temporary, to ascribe a certain kind of feeling to others in accordance
with our wishes, fears, and so on.
To give an illustration of the permanent causes, it is well known that a
conceited man will be disposed to attribute admiration of himself to
others. On the other hand, a shy, timid person will be prone to read
into other minds the opposite kind of feeling.
Coming to temporary forces, we find that any expectation to meet with a
particular kind of mental trait in a new acquaintance will dispose the
observer hastily and erroneously to attribute corresponding feelings to
the person. And if this expectation springs out of a present feeling,
the bias to illusory insight is still more powerful. For example, a
child that fears its parent's displeasure will be prone to misinterpret
the parent's words and actions, colouring them according to its fears.
So an angry man, strongly desirous of making out that a person has
injured him, will be disposed to see signs of conscious guilt in this
person's looks or words. Similarly, a lover will read fine thoughts or
sentiments into the mind of his mistress under the influence of a strong
wish to admire.
And what applies to the illusory interpretation of others' feelings
applies to the ascription of feelings to inanimate objects. This is due
not simply to the impulse to expand one's conscious existence through
far-reaching resonances of sympathy, but also to a permanent or
temporary disposition to attribute a certain kind of feeling to an
object. Thus, the poet personifies nature in part because his emotional
cravings prompt him to construct the idea of something that can be
admired or worshipped. Once more, the action of a momentary feeling when
actually excited is seen in the "mechanical" impulse of a man to
retaliate when he strikes his foot against an object, as a chair, which
clearly involves a tendency to attribute an intention to hurt to the
unoffending body, and the _rationale_ of which odd procedure is pretty
correctly expressed in the popular phrase: "It relieves the feelings."
It is worth noting, perhaps, that these illusions of insight, like those
of perception, may involve an inattention to the actual impression of
the moment. To erroneously attribute a feeling to another through an
excess of sympathetic eagerness is often to overlook what a perfectly
dispassionate observer would see, as, for example, the immobility of the
features or the signs of a deliberate effort to simulate. This
inattention will, it is obvious, be greatest in the poetic attribution
of life and personality to natural objects, in so far as this
approximates to a complete momentary illusion. To see a dark overhanging
rock as a grim sombre human presence, is for the moment to view it under
this aspect only, abstracting from its many obvious unlikenesses.
In the same manner, a tendency to read a particular meaning into a word
may lead to the misapprehension of the word. To give an illustration: I
was lately reading the fifth volume of G. H. Lewes's _Problems of Life
and Mind_. In reading the first sentence of one of the sections, I again
and again fell into the error of taking "The great Lagrange," for "The
great Language." On glancing back I saw that the section was headed "On
Language," and I at once recognized the cause of my error in the
pre-existence in my mind of the representative image of the word
"language."
In concluding this short account of the errors of insight, I may observe
that their range is obviously much greater than that of the previously
considered classes of presentative illusion. This is, indeed, involved
in what has been said about the nature of the process. Insight, as we
have seen, though here classed with preservative cognition, occupies a
kind of border-land between immediate knowledge or intuition and
inference, shading off from the one to the other. And in the very nature
of the case the scope for error must be great. Even overlooking human
reticence, and, what is worse, human hypocrisy, the conditions of an
accurate reading of others' minds are rarely realized. If, as has been
remarked by a good authority, one rarely meets, even among intelligent
people, with a fairly accurate observer of external things, what shall
be said as to the commonly claimed power of "intuitive insight" into
other people's thoughts and feelings, as though it were a process above
suspicion? It is plain, indeed, on a little reflection, that, taking
into account what is required in the way of large and varied experience
(personal and social), a habit of careful introspection, as well as a
habit of subtle discriminative attention to the external signs of mental
life, and lastly, a freedom from prepossession and bias, only a very few
can ever hope even to approximate to good readers of character.
And then we have to bear in mind that this large amount of error is apt
to remain uncorrected. There is not, as in the case of external
perception, an easy way of verification, by calling in another sense; a
misapprehension, once formed, is apt to remain, and I need hardly say
that errors in these matters of mutual comprehension have their palpable
practical consequences. All social cohesion and co-operation rest on
this comprehension, and are limited by its degree of perfection. Nay,
more, all common knowledge itself, in so far as it depends on a mutual
communication of impressions, ideas, and beliefs, is limited by the
fact of this great liability to error in what at first seems to be one
of the most certain kinds of knowledge.
In view of this depressing amount of error, our solace must be found in
the reflection that this seemingly perfect instrument of intuitive
insight is, in reality, like that of introspection, in process of being
fashioned. Mutual comprehension has only become necessary since man
entered the social state, and this, to judge by the evolutionist's
measure of time, is not so long ago. A mental structure so complex and
delicate requires for its development a proportionate degree of
exercise, and it is not reasonable to look yet for perfect precision of
action. Nevertheless, we may hope that, with the advance of social
development, the faculty is continually gaining in precision and
certainty. And, indeed, this hope is already assured to us in the fact
that the faculty has begun to criticise itself, to distinguish between
an erroneous and a true form of its-operation. In fact, all that has
been here said about illusions of insight has involved the assumption
that intellectual culture sharpens the power and makes it less liable to
err.