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.

    371/398 page 351
    The mental processes involved in detecting, resist- ing, and overcoming illusion, are a very interesting subject for the psychologist, though we have not space here to investigate them fully. Turning to presenta- tive, and more particularly sense-illusions, we find that the detection of an illusion takes place now by an appeal from one sense to another, for example, from sight to touch, by way of verification;1 now (as in Myer’s experiment) by a reference from sense and presentation altogether to representation or remem- bered experience and a process of reasoning; and now, (as in the illusions of art) conversely, by a transition of mind from what is suggested to the actual sense- impression of the moment. In the sphere of me- mory, again, illusion is determined, as such, now by attending more carefully to the contents of memory, now by a process of reasoning from some presentative cognition. Finally, errors in our comprehensive general representations of things are known to be such partly by reasoning from other conceptions, and partly by a continual process of reduction of representation to presentation, the general to the particular. I may add that the correction of illusion by an act of re- flection and reasoning, which brings the part into consistent relation with the whole of experience, includes throughout the comparison of the individual with the collective or social experience.2 1 The appeal is not, as we have seen, invariably from sight to touch, but may be in the reverse direction, as in the recognition of the duality of the points of a pair of compasses, which seem one to the tactual sense. 2 I might further remark that this “ collective experience ” includes previously detected illusions of ourselves and of others.
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