ILLUSIONS OF BELIEF.
Our knowledge is commonly said to consist of two large
varieties--Presentative and Representative. Representative knowledge,
again, falls into two chief divisions. The first of these is Memory,
which, though not primary or original, like presentative knowledge, is
still regarded as directly or intuitively certain. The second division
consists of all other representative knowledge besides memory,
including, among other varieties, our anticipations of the future, our
knowledge of others' past experience, and our general knowledge about
things. There is no one term which exactly hits off this large sphere of
cognition: I propose to call it Belief. I am aware that this is by no
means a perfect word for my purpose, since, on the one hand, it suggests
that every form of this knowledge must be less certain than presentative
or mnemonic knowledge, which cannot be assumed; and since, on the other
hand, the word is so useful a one in psychology, for the purpose of
marking off the subjective fact of assurance in all kinds of cognition.
Nevertheless, I know not what better one I could select in order to
make my classification answer as closely as a scientific treatment will
allow to the deeply fixed distinctions of popular psychology.
It might at first seem as if perception, introspection, and memory must
exhaust all that is meant by immediate, or self-evident, knowledge, and
as if what I have here called belief must be uniformly mediate,
derivate, or inferred knowledge. The apprehension of something now
present to the mind, externally or internally, and the reapprehension
through the process of memory of what was once so apprehended, might
appear to be the whole of what can by any stretch of language be called
direct cognition of things. This at least would seem to follow from the
empirical theory of knowledge, which regards perception and memory as
the ground or logical source of all other forms of knowledge.
And even if we suppose, with some philosophers, that there are certain
innate principles of knowledge, it seems now to be generally allowed
that these, apart from the particular facts of experience, are merely
abstractions; and that they only develop into complete knowledge when
they receive some empirical content, which must be supplied either by
present perception or by memory. So that in this case, too, all definite
concrete knowledge would seem to be either presentative cognition,
memory, or, lastly, some mode of inference from these.
A little inquiry into the mental operations which I here include under
the name belief will show, however, that they are by no means uniformly
process of inference. To take the simplest form of such knowledge,
anticipation of some personal experience: this may arise quite apart
from recollection, as a spontaneous projection of a mental image into
the future. A person may feel "intuitively certain" that something is
going to happen to him which does not resemble anything in his past
experience. Not only so; even when the expectation corresponds to a bit
of past experience, this source of the expectation may, under certain
circumstances, be altogether lost to view, and the belief assume a
secondarily automatic or intuitive character. Thus, a man may have first
entertained a belief in the success of some undertaking as the result of
a rough process of inference, but afterwards go on trusting when the
grounds for his confidence are wholly lost sight of.
This much may suffice for the present to show that belief sometimes
approximates to immediate, or self-evident, conviction. How far this is
the case will come out in the course of our inquiry into its different
forms. This being so, it will be needful to include in our present study
the errors connected with the process of belief in so far as they
simulate the immediate instantaneous form of illusion.
What I have here called belief may be roughly distinguished into simple
and compound belief. By a simple belief I mean one which has to do with
a single event or fact. It includes simple modes of expectation, as well
as beliefs in single past facts not guaranteed by memory. A compound
belief, on the other hand, has reference to a number of events or facts.
Thus, our belief in the continued existence of a particular object, as
well as our convictions respecting groups or classes of events, must be
regarded as compound, since they can be shown to include a number of
simple beliefs.
A. _Simple Illusory Belief: Expectation._
It will be well to begin our inquiry by examining the errors connected
with simple expectations, so far as these come under our definition of
illusion. And here, following our usual practice, we may set out with a
very brief account of the nature of the intellectual process in its
correct form. For this purpose we shall do well to take a complete or
definite anticipation of an event as our type.[136]
The ability of the mind to move forward, forecasting an order of events
in time, is clearly very similar to its power of recalling events. Each
depends on the capability of imagination to represent a sequence of
events or experiences. The difference between the two processes is that
in anticipation the imagination setting out from the present traces the
succession of experiences in their actual order, and not in the reverse
order. It would thus appear to be a more natural and easy process than
recollection, and observation bears out this conclusion. Any object
present to perception which is associated with antecedents and
consequents with the same degree of cohesion, calls up its consequents
rather than its antecedents. The spectacle of the rising of the sun
carries the mind much more forcibly forwards to the advancing morning
than backwards to the receding night. And there is good reason to
suppose that in the order of mental development the power of distinctly
expecting an event precedes that of distinctly recollecting one. Thus,
in the case of the infant mind, as of the animal intelligence, the
presence of signs of coming events, as the preparation of food, seems to
excite distinct and vivid expectation.[137]
As a mode of assurance, expectation is clearly marked off from memory,
and is not explainable by means of this. It is a fundamentally distinct
kind of conviction. So far as we are capable of analyzing it, we may say
that its peculiarity is its essentially active character. To expect a
thing is to have stirred the active impulses, including the powers of
attention; it is to be on the alert for it, to have the attention
already focussed for it, and to begin to rehearse the actions which the
actual happening of the event--for example, the approach of a welcome
object--would excite. It thus stands in marked contrast to memory, which
is a passive attitude of mind, becoming active only when it gives rise
to the expectation of a recurrence of the event.[138]
And now let us pass to the question whether expectation ever takes the
form of immediate knowledge. It may, perhaps, be objected that the
anticipation of something future cannot be knowledge at all in the sense
in which the perception of something present or the recollection of
something past is knowledge. But this objection, when examined closely,
appears to be frivolous. Because the future fact has not yet come into
the sphere of actual existence, it is none the less the object of a
perfect assurance.[139]
But, even if it is conceded that expectation is knowledge, the objection
may still be urged that it cannot be immediate, since it is the very
nature of expectation to ground itself on memory. I have already hinted
that this is not the case, and I shall now try to show that what is
called expectation covers much that is indistinguishable from immediate
intuitive certainty, and consequently offers room for an illusory form
of error.
Let us set out with the simplest kind of expectation, the anticipation
of something about to happen within the region of our personal
experience, and similar to what has happened before. And let the coming
of the event be first of all suggested by some present external fact or
sign. Suppose, for example, that the sky is heavy, the air sultry, and
that I have a bad headache; I confidently anticipate a thunderstorm. It
would commonly be said that such an expectation is a kind of inference
from the past. I remember that these appearances have been followed by a
thunderstorm very often, and I infer that they will in this new case be
so followed.
To this, however, it may be replied that in most cases there is no
conscious going back to the past at all. As I have already remarked,
anticipation is pretty certainly in advance of memory in early life. And
even after the habit of passing from the past to the future, from memory
to expectation, has been formed, the number of the past repetitions of
experience would prevent the mind's clearly reverting to them. And,
further, the very force of habit would tend to make the transition from
memory to expectation more and more rapid, automatic, and unconscious.
Thus it comes about that all distinctly suggested approaching events
seem to be expected by a kind of immediate act of belief. The present
signs call up the representation of the coming event with all the force
of a direct intuition. At least, it may be said that if a process of
inference, it is one which has the minimum degree of consciousness.
It might still be urged that the mind passes from the _present_ facts as
signs, and so still performs a kind of reasoning process. This is, no
doubt, true, and differentiates expectation from perception, in which
there is no conscious transition from the presented to the represented.
Still I take it that this is only a process of reasoning in so far as
the sign is consciously generalized, and this is certainly not true of
early expectations, or even of any expectations in a wholly uncultivated
mind.
For these reasons I think that any errors involved in such an
anticipation may, without much forcing, be brought under our definition
of illusion. When due altogether to the immediate force of suggestion in
a present object or event, and not involving any conscious transition
from past to future, or from general truth to particular instance, these
errors appear to me to have more of the character of illusions than of
that of fallacies.
Much the same thing may be said about the vivid anticipations of a
familiar kind of experience called up by a clear and consecutive verbal
suggestion. When a man, even with an apparent air of playfulness, tells
me that something is going to happen, and gives a consistent consecutive
account of this, I have an anticipation which is not consciously
grounded on any past experience of the value of human testimony in
general, or of this person's testimony in particular, but which is
instantaneous and quasi-immediate. Consequently, any error connected
with the mental act approximates to an illusion.
So far I have supposed that the anticipated event is a recurring one,
that is to say, a kind of experience which has already become familiar
to us. This, however, holds good only of a very few of our experiences.
Our life changes as it progresses, both outwardly and inwardly. Many of
our anticipations, when first formed, involve much more than a
reproduction of a past experience, namely, a complex act of constructive
imagination. Our representations of these untried experiences, as, for
example, those connected with a new set of circumstances, a new social
condition, a new mode of occupation, and so on, are clearly at the first
far from simple processes of inference from the past. They are put
together by the aid of many fragmentary images, restored by distinct
threads of association, yet by a process so rapid as to appear like an
intuition. Indeed, the anticipation of such new experiences more often
resembles an instantaneous imaginative intuition than a process of
conscious transition from old experiences. In the case of these
expectations, then, there would clearly seem to be room for illusion
from the first.
But even supposing that the errors connected with the first formation of
an expectation cannot strictly be called illusory, we may see that such
simple expectation will, in certain cases, tend to grow into something
quite indistinguishable from illusion. I refer to expectations of
_remote_ events which allow of frequent renewal. Even supposing the
expectation to have originated from some rational source, as from a
conscious inference from past experience, or from the acceptance of
somebody's statement, the very habit of cherishing the anticipation
tends to invest it with an automatic self-sufficient character. To all
intents and purposes the prevision becomes intuitive, by which I mean
that the mind is at the time immediately certain that something is going
to happen, without needing to fall back on memory or reflection. This
being so, whenever the initial process of inference or quasi-inference
happens to have been bad, an illusory expectation may arise. In other
words, the force of repetition and habit tends to harden what may, in
its initial form, have resembled a kind of fallacy into an illusion.
And now let us proceed further. When a permanent expectation is thus
formed, there arises the possibility of processes which favour illusion
precisely analogous to those which we have studied in the case of
memory.
In the first place, the habit of imagining a future event is attended
with a considerable amount of illusion as to time or remoteness. After
what has been said respecting the conditions of such error in the case
of memory, a very few words will suffice here.
It is clear, then, in the first place, that the mind will tend to
shorten any period of future time, and so to antedate, so to speak, a
given event, in so far as the imagination is able clearly and easily to
run over its probable experiences. From this it follows that repeated
forecastings of series of events, by facilitating the imaginative
process, tend to beget an illusory appearance of contraction in the time
anticipated. Moreover, since in anticipation so much of each division of
the future time-line is unknown, it is obviously easy for the expectant
imagination to skip over long intervals, and so to bring together widely
remote events.
In addition to this general error, there are more special errors. As in
the case of recollection, vividness of mental image suggests
propinquity; and accordingly, all vivid anticipations, to whatever cause
the vividness may be owing, whether to powerful suggestion on the part
of external objects, to verbal suggestion, or to spontaneous imagination
and feeling, are apt to represent their objects as too near.
It follows that an event intensely longed for, in so far as the
imagination is busy in representing it, will seem to approach the
present. At the same time, as we have seen, an event much longed for
commonly appears to be a great while coming, the explanation being that
there is a continually renewed contradiction between anticipation and
perception. The self-adjustment of the mind in the attitude of
expectant attention proves again and again to be vain and futile, and it
is this fact which brings home to it the slowness of the sequences of
perceived fact, as compared with the rapidity of the sequences of
imagination.
When speaking of the retrospective estimate of time, I observed that the
apparent distance of an event depends on our representation of the
intervening time-segment. And the same remark applies to the prospective
estimate. Thus, an occurrence which we expect to happen next week will
seem specially near if we know little or nothing of the contents of the
intervening space, for in this case the imagination does not project the
experience behind a number of other distinctly represented events.
Finally, it is to be remarked that the prospective appreciation of any
duration will tend to err relatively by way of excess, where the time is
exceptionally filled out with clearly expected and deeply interesting
experiences. To the imagination of the child, a holiday, filled with new
experiences, appears to be boundless.
Thus far I have assumed that the date of the future event is a matter
which might be known. It is, however, obvious, from the very nature of
knowledge with respect to the future, that we may sometimes be certain
of a thing happening to us without knowing with any degree of
definiteness when it will happen. In the case of these temporally
undefined expectations, the law already expounded holds good that all
vividness of representation tends to lend the things represented an
appearance of approaching events. On the other hand, there are some
events, such as our own death, which our instinctive feelings tend to
banish to a region so remote as hardly to be realized at all.
So much with respect to errors in the localizing of future events.
In the second place, a habit of imagining a future event or group of
events will give play to those forces which tend to transform a mental
image. In other words, the habitual indulgence of a certain anticipation
tends to an illusory view, not only of the "when?" but also of the
"how?" of the future event. These transformations, due to subtle
processes of emotion and intellect, and reflecting the present habits of
these, exactly resemble those by which a remembered event becomes
gradually transformed. Thus, we carry on our present habits of thought
and feeling into the remote future, foolishly imagining that at a
distant period of life, or in greatly altered circumstances, we shall
desire and aim at the same things as now in our existing circumstances.
In close connection with this forward projection of our present selves,
there betrays itself a tendency to look on future events as answering to
our present desires and aspirations. In this way, we are wont to soften,
beautify, and idealize the future, marking it off from the hard
matter-of-fact present.
The less like the future experience to our past experience, or the more
remote the time anticipated, the greater the scope for such imaginative
transformation. And from this stage of fanciful transformation of a
future reality to the complete imaginative creation of such a reality,
the step is but a small one. Here we reach the full development of
illusory expectation, that which corresponds to hallucination in the
region of sense-perception.
In order to understand these extreme forms of illusory expectation, it
will be necessary to say something more about the relation of
imagination to anticipation in general. There are, I conceive, good
reasons for saying that any kind of vivid imagination tends to pass into
a semblance of an expectation of a coming personal experience, or an
event that is about to happen within the sphere of our own observation.
It has long been recognized by writers, among whom I may mention Dugald
Stewart, that to distinctly imagine an event or object is to feel for
the moment a degree of belief in the corresponding reality. Now, I have
already said that expectation is probably a more natural and an earlier
developed state of mind than memory. And so it seems probable that any
mental image which happens to take hold on the mind, if not recognized
as one of memory, or as corresponding to a fact in somebody else's
experience, naturally assumes the form of an expectation of a personal
experience. The force of the expectation will vary in general as the
vividness and persistence of the mental image. Moreover, it follows,
from what has been said, that this force of imagination will determine
what little time-character we ever give to these wholly ungrounded
illusions.
We see, then, that any process of spontaneous imagination will tend to
beget some degree of illusory expectation. And among the agencies by
which such ungrounded imagination arises, the promptings of feeling play
the most conspicuous part. A present emotional excitement may give to an
imaginative anticipation, such as that of the prophetic enthusiast, a
reality which approximates to that of an actually perceived object. And
even where this force of excitement is wanting, a gentle impulse of
feeling may suffice to beget an assurance of a distant reality. The
unknown recesses of the remote future offer, indeed, the field in which
the illusory impulses of our emotional nature have their richest
harvest.
"Thus, from afar, each dim discover'd scene
More pleasing seems than all the past hath been;
And every form, that Fancy can repair
From dark oblivion, glows divinely there."
The recurring emotions, the ruling aspirations, find objects for
themselves in this veiled region. Feelings too shy to burst forth in
unseemly anticipation of the immediate future, modestly satisfy
themselves with this remote prospect of satisfaction. And thus, there
arises the half-touching, half-amusing spectacle of men and women
continually renewing illusory hopes, and continually pushing the date of
their realization further on as time progresses and brings no actual
fruition.
So far I have spoken of such expectations as refer to future personal
experience only. Growing individual experience and the enlargement of
this by the addition of social experience enable us to frame a number of
other beliefs more or less similar to the simple expectations just dealt
with. Thus, for example, I can forecast with confidence events which
will occur in the lives of others, and which I shall not even witness;
or again, I may even succeed in dimly descrying events, such as
political changes or scientific discoveries, which will happen after my
personal experience is at an end. Once more, I can believe in something
going on now at some distant and even inaccessible point of the
universe, and this appears to involve a conditional expectation, and to
mean that I am certain that I or anybody else would see the phenomenon,
if we could at this moment be transported to the spot.
All such previsions are supposed to be formed by a process of inference
from personal experience, including the trustworthiness of testimony.
Even allowing, however, that this was so in the first stages of the
belief, it is plain that, by dint of frequent renewal, the expectation
would soon cease to be a process of inference, and acquire an apparently
self-evident character. This being so, if the expectation is not
adequately grounded to start with, it is very likely to develop into an
illusion. And it is to be added that these permanent anticipations may
have their origin much more in our own wishes or emotional promptings
than in fact and experience. The mind undisciplined by scientific
training is wont to entertain numerous beliefs of this sort respecting
what is now going on in unvisited parts of the world, or what will
happen hereafter in the distant future. The remote, and therefore
obscure, in space and in time has always been the favourite region for
the projection of pleasant fancies.
Once more, besides these oblique kinds of expectation, I may form other
seemingly simple beliefs, to which the term expectation seems less
clearly applicable. Thus, on waking in the morning and finding the
ground covered with snow, my imagination moves backwards, as in the
process of memory, and realizes the spectacle of the softly falling
snow-flakes in the hours of the night. The oral communication of others'
experience, including the traditions of the race, enables me to set out
from any present point of time, and reconstruct complex chains of
experience of vast length lying beyond the bounds of my own personal
recollection.
I need not here discuss what the exact nature of such beliefs is. J.S.
Mill identifies them with expectations. Thus, according to him, my
belief in the nocturnal snowstorm is the assurance that I should have
seen it had I waited up during the night. So my belief in Cicero's
oratory resolves itself into the conviction that I should have heard
Cicero under certain conditions of time and place, which is identical
with my expectation that I shall hear a certain speaker to-morrow if I
go to the House of Commons.[140] However this be, the thing to note is
that such retrospective beliefs, when once formed, tend to approximate
in character to recollections. This is true even of new beliefs in
recent events directly made known by present objective consequences or
signs, as the snowstorm. For in this case there is commonly no conscious
comparison of the present signs with previously known signs, but merely
a direct quasi-mnemonic passage of mind from the present fact to its
antecedent. And it is still more true of long-entertained retrospective
beliefs. When, for example, the original grounds of an historical
hypothesis are lost sight of, and after the belief has hardened and
solidified by time, it comes to look much more like a recollection than
an expectation. As a matter of fact, we have seen, when studying the
illusions of memory, that our personal experience does become confused
with that of others. And one may say that all long-cherished
retrospective beliefs tend to become assimilated to recollections.
Here then, again, there seems to be room for illusion to arise. Even in
the case of a recent past event, directly made known by present
objective signs, the mind is liable to err just as in the case of
forecasting an immediately approaching event. And such error has all the
force of an illusion: its contradiction is almost as great a shock as
that of a recollection. When, for example, I enter my house, and see a
friend's card lying on the table, I so vividly represent to myself the
recent call of my friend, that when I learn the card is an old one which
has accidentally been put on the table, I experience a sense of
disillusion very similar to that which attends a contradicted
perception. The early crude stages of physical science abundantly
illustrate the genesis of such illusions.
It may be added that if there be any feeling present in the mind at the
time, the barest suggestion of something having happened will suffice to
produce the immediate assurance. Thus, an angry person is apt to hastily
accuse another of having done certain things on next to no evidence. The
love of the marvellous seems to have played a conspicuous part in
building up and sustaining the fanciful hypotheses which mark the dawn
of physical science.
Verbal suggestion is a common mode of producing this semblance of a
recollected event. By means of the narrative style, it vividly suggests
the idea that the events described belong to the past, and excites the
imagination to a retrospective construction of them as though they were
remembered events. Hence the power of works of fiction on the ordinary
mind. Even when there is no approach to an illusion of perception, or to
one of memory in the strict sense, the reading of a work of fiction
begets at the moment a retrospective belief that has a certain
resemblance to a recollection.
All such illusions as those just illustrated, if not afterwards
corrected, tend to harden into yet more distinctly "intuitive" errors.
Thus, for example, one of the crude geological hypotheses, of which Sir
Charles Lyell tells us,[141] would, by the mere fact of being kept
before the mind, tend to petrify into a hard fixed belief. And this
process of hardening is seen strikingly illustrated in the case of
traditional errors, especially when these fall in with our own emotional
propensities. Our habitual representations of the remote historical past
are liable to much the same kind of error as our recollections of early
personal experience. The wrong statements of others and the promptings
of our own fancies may lead in the first instance to a filling up of the
remote past with purely imaginary shapes. Afterwards the particular
origin of the belief is forgotten, and the assurance assumes the aspect
of a perfectly intuitive conviction. The hoary traditional myths
respecting the golden age, and so on, and the persistent errors of
historians under the sway of a strong emotional bias, illustrate such
illusions.
So much as to simple illusions of belief, or such as involve single
representations only. Let us now pass to compound illusions, which
involve a complex group of representations.
B. _Compound Illusory Belief._
A familiar example of a compound belief is the belief in a permanent or
persistent individual object of a certain character. Such an idea,
whatever its whole meaning may be--and this is a disputed point in
philosophy--certainly seems to include a number of particular
representations, corresponding to direct personal recollections, to the
recollections of others, and to numerous anticipations of ourselves and
of others. And if the object be a living creature endowed with feelings,
our idea of it will contain, in addition to these represented
perceptions of ourselves or of others, a series of represented insights,
namely, such as correspond to the inner experience of the being, so far
as this is known or imagined.
It would thus seem that the idea which we habitually carry about with us
respecting a complex individual object is a very composite idea. In
order to see this more fully, let us inquire into what is meant by our
belief in a person. My idea of a particular friend contains, among other
things, numbers of vague representations of his habitual modes of
feeling and acting, and numbers of still more vague expectations of how
he will or might feel and act in certain circumstances.
Now, it is plain that such a composite idea must have been a very slow
growth, involving, in certain stages of its formation, numerous
processes of inference or quasi-inference from the past to the future.
But in process of time these elements fuse inseparably: the directly
known and the inferred no longer stand apart in my mind; my whole
conception of the individual as he has been, is, and will be, seems one
indivisible cognition; and this cognition is so firmly fixed and
presents itself so instantaneously to the mind when I think of the
object, that it has all the appearance of an intuitive conviction.
If this is a fairly accurate description of the structure of these
compound representations and of their attendant beliefs, it is easy to
see how many openings for error they cover. To begin with, my
representation of so complex a thing as a concrete personality must
always be exceedingly inadequate and fragmentary. I see only a few
facets of the person's many-sided mind and character. And yet, in
general, I am not aware of this, but habitually identify my
representation with the totality of the object.
More than this, a little attention to the process by which these
compound beliefs arise will disclose the fact that this apparently
adequate representation of another has arisen in part by other than
logical processes. If the blending of memory and expectation were simply
a mingling of facts with correct inferences from these, it might not
greatly matter; but it is something very different from this. Not only
has our direct observation of the person been very limited, even that
which we have been able to see has not been perfectly mirrored in our
memory. It has already been remarked that recollection is a selective
process, and this truth is strikingly illustrated in the growth of our
enduring representations of things. What stamps itself on my memory is
what surprised me or what deeply interested me at the moment. And then
there are all the risks of mnemonic illusion to be taken into account as
well. Thus, my idea of a person, so far even as it is built up on a
basis of direct personal recollection, is essentially a fragmentary and
to some extent a misleading representation.
Nor is this all. My habitual idea of a person is a resultant of forces
of memory conjoined with other forces. Among these are to be reckoned
the influence of illusory perception or insight, my own and that of
others. The amount of misinterpretation of the words and actions of a
single human being during the course of a long acquaintance must be very
considerable. To these must be added the effect of erroneous single
expectations and reconstructions of past experiences, in so far as these
have not been distinctly contradicted and dissipated. All these errors,
connected with single acts of observing or inferring the feelings and
doings of another, have their effect in distorting the subsequent total
representation of the person.
Finally, we must include a more distinct ingredient of active illusion,
namely, all the complex effects of the activity of imagination as led,
not by fact and experience, but by feeling and desire. Our permanent
idea of another reflects all that we have fondly imagined the person
capable of doing, and thus is made up of an ideal as well as a real
actually known personality. And this result of spontaneous imagination
must be taken to include the ideals entertained by others who are likely
to have influenced us by their beliefs.[142]
Enough has probably been said to show how immensely improbable it is
that our permanent cognition of so complex an object as a particular
human being should be at all an accurate representation of the reality,
how much of the erroneous is certain to get mixed up with the true. And
this being so, we may say that our apparently simple direct cognition of
a given person, our assurance of what he is and will continue to be, is
to some extent illusory.
_Illusion of Self-Esteem._
Let us now pass to another case of compound representation, where the
illusory element is still more striking. I refer to the idea of self
which each of us habitually carries about with him. Every man's opinion
of himself, as a whole, is a very complex mental product, in which facts
known by introspection no doubt play a part, but probably only a very
subordinate part. It is obvious, from what has been said about the
structure of our habitual representations of other individuals, that our
ordinary representation of ourselves will be tinged with that mass of
error which we have found to be connected with single acts of
introspection, recollections of past personal experience, and illusory
single expectations of future personal experiences. How large an opening
for erroneous conviction here presents itself can only be understood by
a reference to certain deeply fixed impulses and feelings connected
with, the very consciousness of self, and favouring what I have marked
off as active illusion. I shall try to show very briefly that each man's
intuitive persuasion of his own powers, gifts, or importance--in brief,
of his own particular value, contains, from the first, a palpable
ingredient of active illusion.
Most persons, one supposes, have with more or less distinct
consciousness framed a notion of their own value, if not to the world
generally, at least to themselves. And this notion, however undefined it
may be, is held to with a singular tenacity of belief. The greater part
of mankind, indeed, seem never to entertain the question whether they
really possess points of excellence. They assume it as a matter
perfectly self-evident, and appear to believe in their vaguely conceived
worth on the same immediate testimony of consciousness by which they
assure themselves of their personal existence. Indeed, the conviction of
personal consequence may be said to be a constant factor in most men's
consciousness. However restrained by the rules of polite intercourse, it
betrays its existence and its energy in innumerable ways. It displays
itself most triumphantly when the mind is suddenly isolated from other
minds, when other men unite in heaping neglect and contempt on the
believer's head. In these moments he proves an almost heroic strength of
confidence, believing in himself and in his claims to careful
consideration when all his acquaintance are practically avowing their
disbelief.
The intensity of this belief in personal value may be observed in very
different forms. The young woman who, quite independently of others'
opinion, and even in defiance of it, cherishes a conviction that her
external attractions have a considerable value; the young man who, in
the face of general indifference, persists in his habit of voluble talk
on the supposition that he is conferring on his fellow-creatures the
fruits of profound wisdom; and the man of years whose opinion of his own
social importance and moral worth is quite disproportionate to the
estimation which others form of his claims--these alike illustrate the
force and pertinacity of the belief.
There are, no doubt, many exceptions to this form of self-appreciation.
In certain robust minds, but little given to self-reflection, the idea
of personal value rarely occurs. And then there are timid, sensitive
natures that betray a tendency to self-distrust of all kinds, and to an
undue depreciation of personal merit. Yet even here traces of an impulse
to think well of self will appear to the attentive eye, and one can
generally recognize that this impulse is only kept down by some other
stronger force, as, for example, extreme sensitiveness to the judgment
of others, great conscientiousness, and so on. And however this be, it
will be allowed that the average man rates himself highly.
It is to be noticed that this persuasion of personal value or excellence
is, in common, very vague. A man may have a general sense of his own
importance without in the least being able to say wherein exactly his
superiority lies. Or, to put it another way, he may have a strong
conviction that he stands high in the scale of morally deserving
persons, and yet be unable to define his position more nearly. Commonly,
the conviction seems to be only definable as an assurance of a
superlative of which the positive and comparative are suppressed. At
most, his idea of his moral altitude resolves itself into the
proposition, "I am a good deal better than Mr. A. or Mr. B." Now, it is
plain that in these intuitive judgments on his own excellence, the man
is making an assertion with respect, not only to inner subjective
feelings which he only can be supposed to know immediately, but also to
external objective facts which are patent to others, namely, to certain
active tendencies and capabilities, to the direction of external conduct
in certain lines.[143] Hence, if the assertion is erroneous, it will be
in plain contradiction to others' perceptions of his powers or moral
endowments. And this is what we actually find. A man's self-esteem, in a
large preponderance of cases, is plainly in excess of others' esteem of
him. What the man conceives himself to be differs widely from what
others conceive him to be.
"Oh wad some power the giftie gie us,
To see oursels as others see us!"
Now, whence comes this large and approximately uniform discrepancy
between our self-esteem and others' esteem of us? By trying to answer
this question we shall come to understand still better the processes by
which the most powerful forms of illusion are generated.
It is, I think, a matter of every-day observation that children manifest
an apparently instinctive disposition to magnify self as soon as the
vaguest idea of self is reached. It is very hard to define this feeling
more precisely than by terming it a rudimentary sense of personal
importance. It may show itself in very different ways, taking now a more
active form, as an impulse of self-assertion, and a desire to enforce
one's own will to the suppression of others' wills, and at another time
wearing the appearance of a passive emotion, an elementary form of
_amour propre_. And it is this feeling which forms the germ of the
self-estimation of adults. For in truth all attribution of value
involves an element of feeling, as respect, and of active desire, and
the ascription of value to one's self is in its simplest form merely the
expression of this state of mind.
But how is it, it may be asked, that this feeling shows itself
instinctively as soon as the idea of self begins to arise in
consciousness? The answer to this question is to be found, I imagine, in
the general laws of mental development. All practical judgments like
that of self-estimation are based on some feeling which is developed
before it; and, again, the feeling itself is based on some instinctive
action which, in like manner, is earlier than the feeling. Thus, for
example, an Englishman's judgment that his native country is of
paramount value springs out of a long-existent sentiment of patriotism,
which sentiment again may be regarded as having slowly grown up about
the half-blindly followed habit of defending and furthering the
interests of one's nation or tribe. In a similar way, one suspects, the
feeling of personal worth, with its accompanying judgment, is a product
of a long process of instinctive action.
What this action is it is scarcely necessary to remind the reader. Every
living organism strives, or acts as if it consciously strove, to
maintain its life and promote its well-being. The actions of plants are
clearly related to the needs of a prosperous existence, individual first
and serial afterwards. The movements of the lower animals have the same
end. Thus, on the supposition that man has been slowly evolved from
lower forms, it is clear that the instinct of self-promotion must be the
deepest and most ineradicable element of his nature, and it is this
instinct which directly underlies the rudimentary sentiment of
self-esteem of which we are now treating.
This instinct will appear, first of all, as the unreflecting organized
habit of seeking individual good, of aiming at individual happiness, and
so of pushing on the action of the individual will. This impulse shows
itself in distinct form as soon as the individual is brought into
competition with another similarly constituted being. It is the force
which displays itself in all opposition and hostility, and it tends to
limit and counteract the gregarious instincts of the race. In the next
place, as intelligence expands, this instinctive action becomes
conscious pursuit of an end, and at this stage the thing pursued
attracts to itself a sentiment. The individual now consciously desires
his own happiness as contrasted with that of others, knowingly aims at
enlarging his own sphere of action to the diminution of others' spheres.
Here we have the nascent sentiment of self-esteem, on which all later
judgments respecting individual importance are, in part at least,
founded.
Thus, we see that long before man had arrived at an idea of self there
had been growing up an emotional predisposition to think well of self.
And in this way we may understand how it is that this sentiment of
self-esteem shows itself immediately and instinctively in the child's
mind as soon as its unfolding consciousness is strong enough to grasp
the first rough idea of personal existence. Far down, so to speak, below
the surface of distinct consciousness, in the intricate formation of
ganglion-cell and nerve-fibre, the connections between the idea of self
and this emotion of esteem have been slowly woven through long ages of
animal development.
Here, then, we seem to have the key to the apparently paradoxical fact
that a man, with all his superior means of studying his own feelings,
commonly esteems himself, in certain respects at least, less accurately
than a good external observer would be capable of doing. In forming an
opinion of ourselves we are exposed to the full force of a powerful
impulse of feeling. This impulse, acting as a bias, enters more or less
distinctly into our single acts of introspection, into our attempts to
recall our past doings, into our insights into the meaning of others'
words and actions as related to ourselves (forming the natural
disposition to enjoy flattery), and finally into our wild dreams as to
our future achievements. It is thus the principal root of that gigantic
illusion of self-conceit, which has long been recognized by practical
sense as one of the greatest obstacles to social action; and by art as
one of the most ludicrous manifestations of human weakness.
If there are all these openings for error in the beliefs we go on
entertaining respecting individual things, including ourselves, there
must be a yet larger number of such openings in those still more
compound beliefs which we habitually hold respecting collections or
classes of things. A single illusion of perception or of memory may
suffice to give rise to a wholly illusory belief in a class of objects,
for example, ghosts. The superstitious beliefs of mankind abundantly
illustrate this complexity of the sources of error. And in the case of
our every-day beliefs respecting real classes of objects, these sources
contribute a considerable quota of error. We may again see this by
examining our ordinary beliefs respecting our fellow-men.
A moment's consideration will show that our prevailing views respecting
any section of mankind, say our fellow-countrymen, or mankind at large,
correspond at best to a very loose process of reasoning. The accidents
of our personal experience and opportunities of observation, the
traditions which coloured our first ideas, the influence of our dominant
feelings in selecting for attention and retention certain aspects of the
complex object, and in idealizing this object,--these sources of passive
and active illusion, must, to say the least, have had as much to do with
our present solidified and seemingly "intuitive" knowledge as anything
that can be called the exercise of individual judgment and reasoning
power.
The force of this observation and the proof that such widely generalized
beliefs are in part illusory, is seen in the fact that men of unlike
experience and unlike temperament form such utterly dissimilar views of
the same object. Thus, as Mr. Spencer has shown,[144] in looking at
things national there may be not only a powerful patriotic bias at work
in the case of the vulgar Philistine, but also a distinctly
anti-patriotic bias in the case of the over-fastidious seeker after
culture. And I need hardly add that the different estimates of mankind
held with equal assurance by the cynic, the misanthropist, and the
philanthropic vindicator of his species, illustrate a like diversity of
the psychological conditions of belief.
Finally, illusion may enter into that still wider collection of beliefs
which make up our ordinary views of life and the world as a whole. Here
there reflect themselves in the plainest manner the accidents of our
individual experience and the peculiar errors to which our intellectual
and emotional conformation disposes us. The world is for us what we feel
it to be; and we feel it to be the cause of our particular emotional
experience. Just as we have found that our environment helps to
determine our idea of self and personal continuity, so, conversely, our
inner experience, our remembered or imagined joys and sorrows throw a
reflection on the outer world, giving it its degree of worth. Hence the
contradictory, and consequently to some extent at least illusory, views
of the optimist and the pessimist, "intuitions" which, I have tried to
show elsewhere, are connected with deeply rooted habits of feeling, and
are antecedent to all reasoned philosophic systems.
If proof were yet wanted that these wide-embracing beliefs may to some
extent be illusory, it would be found in the fact that they can be
distinctly coloured by a temporary mood or mental tone. As I have more
than once had occasion to remark, a feeling when present tends to colour
all the ideas of the time. And when out of sorts, moody, and
discontented, a man is prone to find a large objective cause of his
dissatisfaction in a world out of joint and not moving to his mind.
It is evident that all the permanent beliefs touched on in this chapter
must constitute powerful predispositions with respect to any particular
act of perception, insight, introspection, or recollection. In other
words, these persistent beliefs, so far as individual or personal, are
but another name for those fixed habits of mind which, in the case of
each one of us, constitute our intellectual bias, and the source of the
error known as personal equation. And it may be added that, just as
these erroneous beliefs existing in the shape of fixed prejudices
constitute a bias to new error, so they act as powerful resisting forces
in relation to new truth and the correction of error.
In comparing these illusions of belief with those of perception and
memory, we cannot fail to notice their greater compass or range, in
other words, the greater extent of the region of fact misrepresented.
Even if they are less forcible and irresistible than these errors, they
clearly make up for this by the area which they cover.
Another thing to be observed with respect to these comprehensive beliefs
is that where, as here, so many co-operant conditions are at work, the
whole amount of common objective agreement is greatly reduced. In other
words, individual peculiarities of intellectual conformation, emotional
temperament, and experience have a far wider scope for their influence
in these beliefs than they have in the case of presentative cognitions.
At the same time, it is noteworthy that error much more rapidly
propagates itself here than in the case of our perceptions or
recollections. As we have seen, these beliefs all include much more than
the results of the individual's own experience. They offer a large field
for the influence of personal ascendency, of the contagion of sympathy,
and of authority and tradition. As a consequence of this, the illusions
of belief are likely to be far more persistent than those of perception
or of memory; for not only do they lose that salutary process of
correction which comparison with the experience of others affords, but
they may even be strengthened and upheld to some extent by such social
influences.
And here the question might seem to obtrude itself, whether, in relation
to such a fluctuating mass of belief as that just reviewed, in which
there appears to be so little common agreement, we can correctly speak
of anything as objectively determinable. If illusion and error as a
whole are defined by a reference to what is commonly held true and
certain, what, it may be asked, becomes of the so-called illusions of
belief?
This question will have to be fully dealt with in the following chapter.
Here it may be sufficient to remark that amid all this apparent
deviation of belief from a common standard of truth, there is a clear
tendency to a rational consensus. Thought, by disengaging what is really
matter of permanent and common cognition, both in the individual and
still more in the class,[145] and fixing this quantum of common
cognition in the shape of accurate definitions and universal
propositions, is ever fighting against and restraining the impulses of
individual imagination towards dissociation and isolation of belief. And
this same process of scientific control of belief is ever tending to
correct widespread traditional forms of error, and to erect a new and
better standard of common cognition.
This scientific regulation of belief only fails where the experiences
which underlie the conceptions are individual, variable, and subjective.
Hence there is no definite common conception of the value of life and of
the world, just because the estimate of this value must vary with
individual circumstances, temperament, etc. All that can be looked for
here in the way of a common standard or norm is a rough average
estimate. And this common-sense judgment serves practically as a
sufficient criterion of truth, at least in relation to such extreme
one-sidedness of view as approaches the abnormal, that is to say, one of
the two poles of irrational exaltation, or "joy-madness," and abject
melancholy, which, appear among the phenomena of mental disease.[146]