The Principles of Psychology, Volume 2 (of 2)James, William
Science
The Principles of Psychology, Volume 2 (of 2)
James, William
Psychology
Habit or probability seems also to govern the illusion of the intaglio
profile, and of the hollow mask. We have _never_ seen a human face
except in relief--hence the case with which the present sensation is
overpowered. Hence, too, the obstinacy with which human faces and
forms, and other extremely familiar convex objects, refuse to appear
hollow when viewed through Wheatstone's pseudoscope. Our perception
seems wedded to certain total ways of seeing certain objects. The
moment the object is suggested at all, it takes possession of the mind
in the fulness of its stereotyped habitual form. This explains the
suddenness of the transformations when the perceptions change. The
object shoots back and forth completely from this to that familiar
thing, and doubtful, indeterminate, and composite things are excluded,
apparently because we are _unused_ to their existence.
When we turn from the diagrams to the actual folded visiting-card
and to the real glass, the imagined form seems fully as real as the
correct one. The card flaps over; the glass rim tilts this way or
that, as if some inward spring suddenly became released in our eye. In
these changes the actual retinal image receives different _complements
from the mind_. But the remarkable thing is that the complement and
the image combine so completely that the twain are one flesh, as it
were, and cannot be discriminated in the result. If the complement
be, as we have called it (on pp. 237-8), a set of imaginary absent
eye-sensations, they seem no whit less vividly there than the sensation
which the eye now receives from without.
The case of the after-images distorted by projection upon an oblique
plane is even more strange, for the imagined perspective figure, lying
in the plane, seems less to combine with the one a moment previously
seen by the eye than to suppress it and take its place.[249] The point
needing explanation, then, in all this, is how it comes to pass that,
when imagined sensations are usually so inferior in vivacity to real
ones, they should in these few experiences prove to be almost or quite
their match.
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