Another well-known change is when we look at a landscape with our head
upside-down. Perception is to a certain extent baffled by this
manœuvre; gradations of distance and other space-determinations are
made uncertain; the reproductive or associative processes, in short,
decline; and, simultaneously with their diminution, the colors grow
richer and more varied, and the contrasts of light and shade more
marked. The same thing occurs when we turn a painting bottom-upward. We
lose much of its meaning, but, to compensate for the loss, we feel more
freshly the value of the mere tints and shadings, and become aware of
any lack of purely sensible harmony or balance which they may show. Just
so, if we lie on the floor and look up at the mouth of a person talking
behind us. His lower lip here takes the habitual place of the upper one
upon our retina, and seems animated by the most extraordinary and
unnatural mobility, a mobility which now strikes us because (the
associative processes being disturbed by the unaccustomed point of view)
we get it as a naked sensation and not as part of a familiar object
perceived.
Once more, then, we find ourselves driven to admit that when qualities
of an object impress our sense and we thereupon perceive the object, the
pure sensation as such of those qualities does not still exist inside of
the perception and form a constituent thereof. The pure sensation is one
thing and the perception another, and neither can take place at the same
time with the other, because their cerebral conditions are not the same.
They may _resemble_ each other, but in no respect are they identical
states of mind.
=Perception is of Definite and Probable Things.=--The chief cerebral
conditions of perception are old paths of association radiating from the
sense-impression. If a certain impression be strongly associated with
the attributes of a certain thing, that thing is almost sure to be
perceived when we get the impression. Examples of such things would be
familiar people, places, etc., which we recognize and name at a glance.
But _where the impression is associated with more than one reality_, so
that either of two discrepant sets of residual properties may arise, the
perception is doubtful and vacillating, and _the most that can then be
said of it is that it will be of a_ PROBABLE _thing_, of the thing which
would most usually have given us that sensation.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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