The Mind and the Brain: Being the Authorised Translation of L'Âme et le CorpsBinet, Alfred
Philosophy
The Mind and the Brain: Being the Authorised Translation of L'Âme et le Corps
Binet, Alfred
Mind and body
Let us establish one thing more. Acting as a substitute, the image not
only appears as real as the sensation, it appears to be of the same
nature; and the proof is that they are confounded one with the other,
and that those who are not warned of the fact take one for the other.
Every time a body is perceived, as I previously explained, there are
images which affix themselves to the sensation unnoticed. We think we
perceive when we are really remembering or imagining. This addition of
the image to the sensation is not a petty and insignificant accessory;
it forms the major part, perhaps nine-tenths, of perception. Hence
arise the illusions of the senses, which are the result, not of
sensations but of ideas. From this also comes the difficulty of
knowing exactly what, under certain circumstances, is observation or
perception, where the fact perceived ends, and where conjecture
begins. Once acquainted with all these possibilities of errors, how
can we suppose a radical separation between the sensation and the
image?
Examined more closely, images appear to us to be divisible into as
many kinds as sensations: visual images correspond to visual
sensations, tactile to tactile, and so on with all the senses.
That which we experience in the form of sensation, we can experience
over again in the form of image, and the repetition, generally weaker
in intensity and poorer in details, may, under certain favourable
circumstances, acquire an exceptional intensity, and even equal
reality: as is shown by hallucinations. Here, certainly, are very
sound reasons for acknowledging that the images which are at the
bottom of our thoughts, and form the object of them, are the
repetition, the modification, the transposition, the analysis or the
synthesis of sensations experienced in the past, and possessing, in
consequence, all the characteristics of bodily states. I believe that
there is neither more nor less spirituality in the idea than in the
sensation. That which forms its spirituality is the implied act of
cognition; but its object is material.
I foresee a final objection: I shall be told that even when the
unreality of the image is not the rule, and appears only under certain
circumstances, it nevertheless exists. This is an important fact. It
has been argued from the unreality of dreams and hallucinations in
which we give a body to our ideas, that we do not in reality perceive
external bodies, but simply psychical states and modifications of our
souls. If our ideas consist--according to the hypothesis I uphold--in
physical impressions which are felt, we shall be told that these
particular impressions must participate in the nature of everything
physical; that they are real, and always real; that they cannot be
unreal, fictitious, and mendacious, and that, consequently, the
fictitious character of ideation becomes inexplicable.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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