A first book in psychology / by Mary Whiton Calkins.

  • Mary Whiton Calkins
Date:
1910
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A first book in psychology / by Mary Whiton Calkins. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    whether these visions are illusions, that is, conditioned in part by peripheral excitation, or whether they are hallucinations, that is, conditioned by cerebral excitation only. Sometimes, however, the distinction is obvious. For example, the phantoms which haunted Charles IX. after the massacre of St. Bartholomew were hallucinations, but the image of Byron which appeared to Sir Walter Scott was a mere illusion, for the clothes of the figure con¬ sisted, Sir Walter discovered, of the folds of a curtain. Far more important as materials for study than these vivid, yet often confused and unverified, stories from which we have quoted, are the massed results of an International Census on Waking Hallucinations, made by the Society for Psychical Research.* The question on which this study is based is the following: “Have you ever, when believing yourself to be completely awake, had a vivid impression of seeing or being touched by a living being or in¬ animate object, or of hearing a voice, which impression, so far as you could discover, was not due to any external physical cause? ” To this question, 27,329 answers were given, and of these, 3271, or 11.96 per cent, were affirmative; in other words, one out of every twelve of the persons reached by the investigation asserted that he had experienced hallucinations. This percentage, however, is, in all probability, too high to be representative, for the larger the number of answers received by any one collector of these statistics, the smaller was the number of affirmative replies. It follows that if the investigation were further extended, the percent¬ age would probably fall still lower.f Yet, with all allowances for overestimation, the fact remains that waking hallucinations must be commoner than many of us think. Visual hallucinations far outnumber the others: of 2232 cases completely described, 1441 included visual elements, 850 were partly auditory, and only 244 were tactile. Most of these hallucinations related to people, living or dead, but a few represented angels or supernatural beings, and a slightly larger number were grotesque or horrible figures. About * Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, Vol. X., 1894. f Edmund Parish, ‘‘Hallucinations and Illusions” (Scribner, 1897), pp. 85 ff.
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