The Principles of Psychology, Volume 2 (of 2)James, William
Science
The Principles of Psychology, Volume 2 (of 2)
James, William
Psychology
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.[88]
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.
On a later page other instances will meet us. For the present these are
enough to prove our point. Once more we find ourselves driven to admit
that when qualities of an object impress our sense and we thereupon
perceive the object, the sensation as such of those qualities does not
still exist inside of the perception and form a constituent thereof.
The 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 the paths of
association irradiating from the sense-impression, which may have been
already formed. If a certain sensation be strongly associated with
the attributes of a certain thing, that thing is almost sure to be
perceived when we get the sensation. Examples of such things would be
familiar people, places, etc., which we recognize and name at a glance.
But _where the sensation 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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