Another danger lies in the testimony of witnesses who have a certain
sense of form in representation and whose inferential leaps consists in
their omitting the detailed expression and in inserting the notion of
form instead. I learned of this notable psychosis from a bookkeeper of a
large factory, who had to provide for the test of numberless additions.
It was his notion that if we were to add two and three are five, and six
are eleven, and seven are eighteen we should never finish adding, and
since the avoidance of mistakes requires such adding we must so contrive
that the image of two and three shall immediately call forth the image
of five. Now this mental image of five is added with the actual six and
gives eleven, etc. According to this we do not add, we see only a series
of images, and so rapidly that we can follow with a pencil but slowly.
And the images are so certain that mistake is impossible. “You know how
9 looks? Well, just as certainly we know what the image of 27 and 4 is
like; the image of 31 occurs without change.”
This, as it happens, is a procedure possible only to a limited type, but
this type occurs not only among bookkeepers. When any one of such
persons unites two events he does not consider what may result from such
a union; he sees, if I may say so, only a resulting image. This image,
however, is not so indubitably certain as in the case of numbers; and it
may take all kinds of forms, the correctness of which is not altogether
probable. E. g., the witness sees two forms in the dark and the flash of
a knife and hears a cry. If he belongs to the type under discussion he
does not consider that he might have been so frightened by the flashing
knife as to have cried out, or that he had himself proceeded to attack
with a stick and that the other fellow did the yelling, or that a stab
or cut had preceded the cry--no, he saw the image of the two forms and
the knife and he heard the cry and these leap together into an image,
i.e., one of the forms has a cut above his brow. And these leaps occur
so swiftly and with such assurance that the witness in question often
believes himself to have seen what he infers and swears to it.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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