The mental processes involved in detecting, resisting, and overcoming
illusion, are a very interesting subject for the psychologist, though we
have not space here to investigate them fully. Turning to presentative,
and more particularly sense-illusions, we find that the detection of an
illusion takes place now by an appeal from one sense to another, for
example, from sight to touch, by way of verification;[156] now (as in
Myer's experiment) by a reference from sense and presentation altogether
to representation or remembered experience and a process of reasoning;
and now, (as in the illusions of art) conversely, by a transition of
mind from what is suggested to the actual sense-impression of the
moment. In the sphere of memory, again, illusion is determined, as such,
now by attending more carefully to the contents of memory, now by a
process of reasoning from some presentative cognition. Finally, errors
in our comprehensive general representations of things are known to be
such partly by reasoning from other conceptions, and partly by a
continual process of reduction of representation to presentation, the
general to the particular. I may add that the correction of illusion by
an act of reflection and reasoning, which brings the part into
consistent relation with the whole of experience, includes throughout
the comparison of the individual with the collective or social
experience.[157]
We may, perhaps, roughly summarize these operations by saying that they
consist in the control of the lower automatic processes (association or
suggestion) by the higher activities of conscious will. This activity of
will takes the form now of an effort of attention to what is directly
present to the mind (sense-impression, internal feeling, mnemonic image,
etc.), now of conscious reflection, judgment, and reasoning, by which
the error is brought into relation to our experience as a whole,
individual and collective.
It is for the philosopher to investigate the inmost nature of these
operations as they exhibit themselves in our every-day individual
experience, and in the large intellectual movements of history. In no
better way can he arrive at what common sense and science regard as
certain cognition, at the kinds of knowledge on which they are wont to
rely most unhesitatingly.
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