The same vicariousness occurs when perception is attributed to one sense
while it properly belongs to another. This happens particularly at such
times when one has not been present during the event or when the
perception was made while only half awake, or a long time ago, and
finally, when a group of other impressions have accompanied the event,
so that there was not time enough, if I may say so, properly to register
the sense impression. So, e.g., some person, especially a close friend,
may have been merely heard and later quite convincingly supposed to have
been seen. Sensitive people, who generally have an acuter olfactory
sense than others, attach to any perceived odor all the other
appropriate phenomena. The vicariousnesses of visual sensations are the
most numerous and the most important. Anybody who has been pushed or
beaten, and has felt the blows, will, if other circumstances permit and
the impulse is strong enough, be convinced that he has seen his
assaulter and the manner of the assault. Sometimes people who are shot
at will claim to have seen the flight of the ball. And so again they
will have seen in a dark night a comparatively distant wagon, although
they have only heard the noise it made and felt the vibration. It is
fortunate that, as a rule, such people try to be just in answering to
questions which concern this substitution of one sense-perception for
another. And such questions ought to be urgently put. That a false
testimony can cause significant errors is as obvious as the fact that
such substitutions are most frequent with nervous and imaginative
persons.
Still more significant is that characteristic phenomenon, to us of
considerable importance, which might be called retrospective
illumination of perception. It consists in the appearance of a
sense-perception under conditions of some noticeable interruption, when
the stimulus does not, as a rule, give rise to that perception. I cite a
simple example in which I first observed this fact. Since I was a child
there had been in my bed-room a clock, the loud ticking of which habit
of many years prevented my hearing. Once, as I lay awake in bed, I heard
it tick suddenly three times, then fall silent and stop. The occurrence
interested me, I quickly got a light and examined the clock closely. The
pendulum still swung, but without a sound; the time was right. I
inferred that the clock must have stopped going just a few minutes
before. And I soon found out why: the clock is not encased and the
weight of the pendulum hangs free. Now under the clock there always
stood a chair which this time had been so placed as to be inclined
further backward. The weight followed that inclination and so the
silence came about.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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