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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    PERSISTENCE OF INTUITIONS. an eternal youth, is a question which we of to-day seem, on a first view of the matter, to have no way of an- swering which does not assume the very point in question—the truth or falsity of the belief.. This much may, however, he said. The associationist who resolves these erroneous intuitioDS into the play of association, admits that the forces at work generating and consolidating the illusory belief are constant and permanent forces, and such, as are not likely to be less effective in the future than they have been in the past. Thus, he teaches that the intuition of the single object in the act of perception owes its strength to “ in- separable association,” according to which law the ideas of the separate “ possibilities of sensation,” which are all we know of the object, coalesce in the shape of an idea of a single uniting substance. He adds, perhaps, that heredity has tended, and will still tend, to fix the habit of thus transforming an actual multi- plicity into an imaginary unity. And in thus arguing, he is allowing that the illusion is one which, to say the least of it, it will always be exceedingly difficult for reason to dislodge. In view of this uncertainty, and of the possibility, if not the probability, of these beliefs remaining as they have remained, at least approximately universal, the man of science will probably be disposed to hold himself indifferently to the question. He will be inclined to say, “What does it matter whether you call such an apparently permanent belief the cor- relative of a reality or an illusion? Hoes it make any practical difference whether a universal ‘ intui- tion/ of which we cannot rid ourselves, be described
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