Illusions : a psychological study.

  • Sully, James, 1842-1923.
Date:
1887
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Illusions : a psychological study. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The University of Leeds Library. The original may be consulted at The University of Leeds Library.

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    as a uniformly recurring fiction of the imagination, or an integral constitutive factor of intelligence? And, in considering the historical aspect of the ques- tion, does it not come to much the same thing whether such permanent mental products be spoken of as the attenuated forms or ghostly survivals of more sub- stantial primitive illusions (for example, anthropo- morphic representations of material objects, ‘animistic’ representations of mind and personality), or as the slowly perfected results of intellectual evolution ? ” This attitude of the scientific mind towards philo- sophic problems will be confirmed when it is seen that those who seek to resolve stable common convictions into illusions are forced, by their very mode of demon- stration, to allow these intuitions a measure of validity. Thus, the ideas of the unity and externality attributed to the object in the act of perception are said by the associationist to answer to a matter of fact, namely, the permanent coexistence of certain possibilities of sensation, and the dependence of the single sensations of the individual on the presence of the most permanent of these possibilities, namely, those of the active or muscular and passive sensations of touch, which are, moreover, by far the most constant for all minds. Similarly, the idea of a necessary connection between cause and effect, even if illusory in so far as it expresses an objective necessity, is allowed to be true as an ex- pression of that uniformity of our experience which all scientific progress tends to illustrate more and moie distinctly. And even the idea of a permanent sell, as distinct from particular fugitive feelings, is admitted by the associationist to be correct in so far as it ex-