Illusions by James Sully (story reading txt) 📕

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]

CHAPTER XII. RESULTS.

The foregoing study of illusions may not improbably have had a bewildering effect on the mind of the reader. To keep the mental eye, like the bodily eye, for any time intently fixed on one object is apt to produce a feeling of giddiness. And in the case of a subject like illusion, the effect is enormously increased by the disturbing character of the object looked at. Indeed, the first feeling produced by our survey of the wide field of illusory error might be expressed pretty accurately by the despondent cry of the poet—

"Alas! it is delusion all:
The future cheats us from afar,
Nor can we be what we recall,
Nor dare we think on what we are."

It must be confessed that our study has tended to bring home