Illusion, as distinguished from correct knowledge, is, to put it
broadly, deviation of representation from fact. This is due in part to
limitations and defects in the intellectual mechanism itself, such as
the imperfections of the activities of attention, discrimination, and
comparison, in relation to what is present. Still more is it due to the
control of our mental processes by association and habit. These forces,
which are at the very root of intelligence, are also, in a sense, the
originators of error. Through the accidents of our experience or the
momentary condition of our reproductive power, representations get
wrongly grouped with presentations and with one another; wrongly
grouped, that is to say, according to a perfect or ideal standard,
namely, that the grouping should always exactly agree with the order of
experience as a whole, and the force of cohesion be proportionate to the
number of the conjunctions of this experience.
This great source of error has been so abundantly illustrated under the
head of Passive Illusions that I need not dwell on it further. It is
plain that a passive error of perception, or of expectation, is due in
general to a defective grouping of elements, to a grouping which
answers, perhaps, to the run of the individual's actual experience, but
not to a large and complete common experience.[148] Similarly, an
illusory general belief is plainly a welding together of elements (here
concepts, answering to innumerable representative images) in
disagreement with the permanent connections of experience. Even a
passive illusion of memory, in so far as it involves a rearrangement of
successive representations, shows the same kind of defect.
In the second place, this incorrect grouping maybe due, not to defects
in attention and discrimination, combined with insufficiently grounded
association, but to the independent play of constructive imagination and
the caprices of feeling. This is illustrated in what I have called
Active Illusions, whether the excited perceptions and the hallucinations
of sense, or the fanciful projections of memory or of expectation. Here
we have a force directly opposed to that of experience. Active illusion
arises, not through the imperfections of the intellectual mechanism, but
through a palpable interference with this mechanism. It is a regrouping
of elements which simulates the form of a suggestion by experience, but
is, in reality, the outcome of the individual mind's extra-intellectual
impulses.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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