The account of the apparent ruptures in our personal identity given in
this chapter may help us to understand the strange tendency to confuse
self with other objects which occasionally appears in waking
consciousness and in dreams. These errors may be said generally to be
due to the breaking up of the composite image of self into its
fragments, and the regarding of certain of these only. Thus, the
momentary occurrence of partial illusion in intense sympathy with
others, including that imaginative projection of self into inanimate
objects, to which reference has already been made, may be said to depend
on exclusive attention to the subjective aspect of self, to the total
disregard of the objective aspect. In other words, when we thus
momentarily "lose ourselves," or merge our own existence in that of
another object, we clearly let drop out of sight the visual
representation of our own individual organism. On the other hand, when
in dreams we double our personality, or represent to ourselves an
external self which becomes the object of visual perception, it is
probably because we isolate in imagination the objective aspect of our
personality from the other and subjective aspect. It is not at all
unlikely that the several confusions of self touched on in this chapter
have had something to do with the genesis of the various historical
theories of a transformed existence, as, for example, the celebrated
doctrine of metempsychosis.
CHAPTER XI.
ILLUSIONS OF BELIEF.
Our knowledge is commonly said to consist of two large
varieties--Presentative and Representative. Representative knowledge,
again, falls into two chief divisions. The first of these is Memory,
which, though not primary or original, like presentative knowledge, is
still regarded as directly or intuitively certain. The second division
consists of all other representative knowledge besides memory,
including, among other varieties, our anticipations of the future, our
knowledge of others' past experience, and our general knowledge about
things. There is no one term which exactly hits off this large sphere of
cognition: I propose to call it Belief. I am aware that this is by no
means a perfect word for my purpose, since, on the one hand, it suggests
that every form of this knowledge must be less certain than presentative
or mnemonic knowledge, which cannot be assumed; and since, on the other
hand, the word is so useful a one in psychology, for the purpose of
marking off the subjective fact of assurance in all kinds of cognition.
Nevertheless, I know not what better one I could select in order to
make my classification answer as closely as a scientific treatment will
allow to the deeply fixed distinctions of popular psychology.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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