This heading includes all those manifold cases in which mental
presentation is accepted as actual, whether they are concerned with
genuine memory pictures or merely some mental content worked up for
the occasion. When a fever patient sees an absent friend bodily before
him, we call this imagination as well as when he seems to see absurd or
grotesque things. The distinguishing feature is whether the illusion
appears as a substitute for reality, as in dreams, delirium, hypnosis,
and insanity, or as the product of conscious self-deception (K. Lange’s
“bewusste Selbsttäuschung,” P. Souriau’s “illusion volontaire”), where
the knowledge that we have ourselves produced the illusion prevents
actual substitution, as in play and art. Transition from one to
the other of these states is easy. The dreamer or fever patient may
have the feeling that the fantasy in which he lives and suffers is,
after all, an unreal thing; and, on the other hand, illusion is often
so strong for playing children and artists that it forms a perfect
substitute for reality. Just now we are concerned with conscious
illusion only. In inquiring how far experimentation is involved in
it we must bear in mind that there are two sides to all illusion,
one which has reference to an internal image, and the other blending
with external phenomena. It is a distinction similar to that between
hallucination and illusion in the narrower pathological sense.
The illusion which depends on internal images can, as we have seen,
elevate actual memories as well as convertible mental contents to the
appearance of reality. So we see that the two kinds of mental activity
included under the name imagination are intimately and variously
related, while neither alone covers the entire ground. Enjoyment of
play with memory pictures which are more than ordinarily faithful to
fact is practised almost exclusively by adults, and more especially
by the aged. The psychological condition of this is that by means
of strong concentration of attention on the mental picture (we are
reminded again of hypnosis) the actual present is thrown very much into
the background, and the past thus conjured up loses many of the usual
characteristics of a past, since the memory picture, from lacking the
usual projection, assumes the expression of reality. The following is
a beautiful example of this distinction between mere reflective memory
and playful illusion where the differentiation was gradually built up.
When Goethe as a mature man took up his Faust manuscript, he said to
himself, “I thought over this subject a great deal ten years ago; but
that would be only a memory.” Yet as he lost himself in the joyful or
painful memories connected with that period, he came to ignore the
fact that they were long past, and more and more substituted them for
the present, which in its turn became gradually submerged. These words
reveal the play of his imagination:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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