commission smelt a disgusting odor while a coffin was being exhumed only
to discover that it was empty. If the coffin, for one reason or another,
had not been opened all those present would have taken oath that they
had an indubitable perception although the latter was only inferred from
its precedent condition.
Exner[154] cites the excellent example in which a mother becomes
frightened while her child cries, not because the cry as such sounds so
terrible as because of its combination with the consciousness that it
comes from her own child and that something might have happened to it.
It is asserted, and I think rightly, that verbal associations have a
considerable share in such cases. As Stricker[155] expresses it, the
form of any conceptual complex whatever, brings out its appropriate
word. If we see the _thing_ watch, we get the _word_ watch. If we see a
man with a definite symptom of consumption the word tuberculosis occurs
at once. The last example is rather more significant because when the
whole complex appears mistakes are more remote than when merely one or
another “safe” symptom permits the appearance of the word in question.
What is safe to one mind need not be so to another, and the notion as to
the certainty of any symptom changes with time and place and person.
Mistakes are especially possible when people are so certain of their
“safe” symptoms that they do not examine how they inferred from them.
This inference, however, is directly related to the appearance of the
word. Return to the example mentioned above, and suppose that A has
discovered a “safe” symptom of consumption in B and the word
tuberculosis occurs to him. But the occurrence does not leave him with
the word merely, there is a direct inference “B has tuberculosis.” We
never begin anything with the word alone, we attach it immediately to
some fact and in the present case it has become, as usual, a judgment.
The thought-movement of him who has heard this judgment, however, turns
backward and he supposes that the judge has had a long series of
sense-perceptions from which he has derived his inference. And in fact
he has had only one perception, the reliability of which is often
questionable.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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