Illusions : a psychological study / by James Sully.

  • James Sully
Date:
1882
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Illusions : a psychological study / by James Sully. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    direct process of adaptation. The exercise of a function tends to the development of that function. Thus, our acts of perception must become more exact by mere repetition. So, too, the representations and concepts growing out of perceptions must tend to approximate to external facts by the direct action of the environment on our physical and psychical organism; for external relations which are permanent will, in the long run, stamp themselves on our nervous and mental structure more deeply and indelibly than relations which are variable and accidental. It would seem, from all this, that so long as we are keeping to the scientific point of view, that is to say, taking for granted that there is something ob- jectively real answering to our perceptions and con- ceptions, the question of the possibility of a universal or (permanently) common illusion does not arise. Yet a little more reflection will show us that it may arise in a way. So far as the logical sufficiency of the social consensus or common belief is accepted as scientifically proved, it is open to suspicion on strictly scientific grounds. The evolutionist’s proof involves one or two assumptions which are not exactly true. In the first place, it is not strictly correct to say that all illusion involves a practical unfitness to cir- cumstances. At the close of our investigation of particular groups of illusion, for example, those of per- ception and memory, it was pointed out that many of the errors reviewed were practically harmless, being either momentary and evanescent, or of such a cha- racter as not to lead to injurious action. And now, by glancing back over the field of illusion as a whole,
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