We should expect from all this that in the act of introspection the mind
is apt, within certain limits, to find what it is prepared to find. And
since there is in these acts often a distinct wish to detect some
particular feeling, we can see how easy it must be for a man through
bias and a wrong focussing of the attention to deceive himself up to a
certain point with respect to the actual contents of his mind.
Let us examine one of these active illusions a little more fully. It
would at first sight seem to be a perfectly simple thing to determine at
any given moment whether we are enjoying ourselves, whether our
emotional condition rises above the pleasure-threshold or point of
indifference and takes on a positive hue of the agreeable or
pleasurable. Yet there is good reason for supposing that people not
unfrequently deceive themselves on this matter. It is, perhaps, hardly
an exaggeration to say that most of us are capable of imagining that we
are having enjoyment when we conform to the temporary fashion of social
amusement. It has been cynically observed that people go into society
less in order to be happy than to seem so, and one may add that in this
semblance of enjoyment they may, provided they are not _blase_, deceive
themselves as well as others. The expectation of enjoyment, the
knowledge that the occasion is intended to bring about this result, the
recognition of the external signs of enjoyment in others--all this may
serve to blind a man in the earlier stages of social amusement to his
actual mental condition.
If we look closely into this variety of illusion, we shall see that it
is very similar in its structure and origin to that kind of erroneous
perception which arises from inattention to the actual impression of the
moment under the influence of a strong expectation of something
different. The representation of ourselves as entertained dislodges from
our internal field of vision our actual condition, relegating this to
the region of obscure consciousness. Could we for a moment get rid of
this representation and look at the real feelings of the time, we should
become aware of our error; and it is possible that the process of
becoming _blase_ involves a waking up to a good deal of illusion of the
kind.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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