Part 16 (1/2)

So far I have supposed that the antic.i.p.ated event is a recurring one, that is to say, a kind of experience which has already become familiar to us. This, however, holds good only of a very few of our experiences.

Our life changes as it progresses, both outwardly and inwardly. Many of our antic.i.p.ations, when first formed, involve much more than a reproduction of a past experience, namely, a complex act of constructive imagination. Our representations of these untried experiences, as, for example, those connected with a new set of circ.u.mstances, a new social condition, a new mode of occupation, and so on, are clearly at the first far from simple processes of inference from the past. They are put together by the aid of many fragmentary images, restored by distinct threads of a.s.sociation, yet by a process so rapid as to appear like an intuition. Indeed, the antic.i.p.ation of such new experiences more often resembles an instantaneous imaginative intuition than a process of conscious transition from old experiences. In the case of these expectations, then, there would clearly seem to be room for illusion from the first.

But even supposing that the errors connected with the first formation of an expectation cannot strictly be called illusory, we may see that such simple expectation will, in certain cases, tend to grow into something quite indistinguishable from illusion. I refer to expectations of _remote_ events which allow of frequent renewal. Even supposing the expectation to have originated from some rational source, as from a conscious inference from past experience, or from the acceptance of somebody's statement, the very habit of cheris.h.i.+ng the antic.i.p.ation tends to invest it with an automatic self-sufficient character. To all intents and purposes the prevision becomes intuitive, by which I mean that the mind is at the time immediately certain that something is going to happen, without needing to fall back on memory or reflection. This being so, whenever the initial process of inference or quasi-inference happens to have been bad, an illusory expectation may arise. In other words, the force of repet.i.tion and habit tends to harden what may, in its initial form, have resembled a kind of fallacy into an illusion.

And now let us proceed further. When a permanent expectation is thus formed, there arises the possibility of processes which favour illusion precisely a.n.a.logous to those which we have studied in the case of memory.

In the first place, the habit of imagining a future event is attended with a considerable amount of illusion as to time or remoteness. After what has been said respecting the conditions of such error in the case of memory, a very few words will suffice here.

It is clear, then, in the first place, that the mind will tend to shorten any period of future time, and so to antedate, so to speak, a given event, in so far as the imagination is able clearly and easily to run over its probable experiences. From this it follows that repeated forecastings of series of events, by facilitating the imaginative process, tend to beget an illusory appearance of contraction in the time antic.i.p.ated. Moreover, since in antic.i.p.ation so much of each division of the future time-line is unknown, it is obviously easy for the expectant imagination to skip over long intervals, and so to bring together widely remote events.

In addition to this general error, there are more special errors. As in the case of recollection, vividness of mental image suggests propinquity; and accordingly, all vivid antic.i.p.ations, to whatever cause the vividness may be owing, whether to powerful suggestion on the part of external objects, to verbal suggestion, or to spontaneous imagination and feeling, are apt to represent their objects as too near.

It follows that an event intensely longed for, in so far as the imagination is busy in representing it, will seem to approach the present. At the same time, as we have seen, an event much longed for commonly appears to be a great while coming, the explanation being that there is a continually renewed contradiction between antic.i.p.ation and perception. The self-adjustment of the mind in the att.i.tude of expectant attention proves again and again to be vain and futile, and it is this fact which brings home to it the slowness of the sequences of perceived fact, as compared with the rapidity of the sequences of imagination.

When speaking of the retrospective estimate of time, I observed that the apparent distance of an event depends on our representation of the intervening time-segment. And the same remark applies to the prospective estimate. Thus, an occurrence which we expect to happen next week will seem specially near if we know little or nothing of the contents of the intervening s.p.a.ce, for in this case the imagination does not project the experience behind a number of other distinctly represented events.

Finally, it is to be remarked that the prospective appreciation of any duration will tend to err relatively by way of excess, where the time is exceptionally filled out with clearly expected and deeply interesting experiences. To the imagination of the child, a holiday, filled with new experiences, appears to be boundless.

Thus far I have a.s.sumed that the date of the future event is a matter which might be known. It is, however, obvious, from the very nature of knowledge with respect to the future, that we may sometimes be certain of a thing happening to us without knowing with any degree of definiteness when it will happen. In the case of these temporally undefined expectations, the law already expounded holds good that all vividness of representation tends to lend the things represented an appearance of approaching events. On the other hand, there are some events, such as our own death, which our instinctive feelings tend to banish to a region so remote as hardly to be realized at all.

So much with respect to errors in the localizing of future events.

In the second place, a habit of imagining a future event or group of events will give play to those forces which tend to transform a mental image. In other words, the habitual indulgence of a certain antic.i.p.ation tends to an illusory view, not only of the ”when?” but also of the ”how?” of the future event. These transformations, due to subtle processes of emotion and intellect, and reflecting the present habits of these, exactly resemble those by which a remembered event becomes gradually transformed. Thus, we carry on our present habits of thought and feeling into the remote future, foolishly imagining that at a distant period of life, or in greatly altered circ.u.mstances, we shall desire and aim at the same things as now in our existing circ.u.mstances.

In close connection with this forward projection of our present selves, there betrays itself a tendency to look on future events as answering to our present desires and aspirations. In this way, we are wont to soften, beautify, and idealize the future, marking it off from the hard matter-of-fact present.

The less like the future experience to our past experience, or the more remote the time antic.i.p.ated, the greater the scope for such imaginative transformation. And from this stage of fanciful transformation of a future reality to the complete imaginative creation of such a reality, the step is but a small one. Here we reach the full development of illusory expectation, that which corresponds to hallucination in the region of sense-perception.

In order to understand these extreme forms of illusory expectation, it will be necessary to say something more about the relation of imagination to antic.i.p.ation in general. There are, I conceive, good reasons for saying that any kind of vivid imagination tends to pa.s.s into a semblance of an expectation of a coming personal experience, or an event that is about to happen within the sphere of our own observation.

It has long been recognized by writers, among whom I may mention Dugald Stewart, that to distinctly imagine an event or object is to feel for the moment a degree of belief in the corresponding reality. Now, I have already said that expectation is probably a more natural and an earlier developed state of mind than memory. And so it seems probable that any mental image which happens to take hold on the mind, if not recognized as one of memory, or as corresponding to a fact in somebody else's experience, naturally a.s.sumes the form of an expectation of a personal experience. The force of the expectation will vary in general as the vividness and persistence of the mental image. Moreover, it follows, from what has been said, that this force of imagination will determine what little time-character we ever give to these wholly ungrounded illusions.

We see, then, that any process of spontaneous imagination will tend to beget some degree of illusory expectation. And among the agencies by which such ungrounded imagination arises, the promptings of feeling play the most conspicuous part. A present emotional excitement may give to an imaginative antic.i.p.ation, such as that of the prophetic enthusiast, a reality which approximates to that of an actually perceived object. And even where this force of excitement is wanting, a gentle impulse of feeling may suffice to beget an a.s.surance of a distant reality. The unknown recesses of the remote future offer, indeed, the field in which the illusory impulses of our emotional nature have their richest harvest.

”Thus, from afar, each dim discover'd scene More pleasing seems than all the past hath been; And every form, that Fancy can repair From dark oblivion, glows divinely there.”

The recurring emotions, the ruling aspirations, find objects for themselves in this veiled region. Feelings too shy to burst forth in unseemly antic.i.p.ation of the immediate future, modestly satisfy themselves with this remote prospect of satisfaction. And thus, there arises the half-touching, half-amusing spectacle of men and women continually renewing illusory hopes, and continually pus.h.i.+ng the date of their realization further on as time progresses and brings no actual fruition.

So far I have spoken of such expectations as refer to future personal experience only. Growing individual experience and the enlargement of this by the addition of social experience enable us to frame a number of other beliefs more or less similar to the simple expectations just dealt with. Thus, for example, I can forecast with confidence events which will occur in the lives of others, and which I shall not even witness; or again, I may even succeed in dimly descrying events, such as political changes or scientific discoveries, which will happen after my personal experience is at an end. Once more, I can believe in something going on now at some distant and even inaccessible point of the universe, and this appears to involve a conditional expectation, and to mean that I am certain that I or anybody else would see the phenomenon, if we could at this moment be transported to the spot.

All such previsions are supposed to be formed by a process of inference from personal experience, including the trustworthiness of testimony.

Even allowing, however, that this was so in the first stages of the belief, it is plain that, by dint of frequent renewal, the expectation would soon cease to be a process of inference, and acquire an apparently self-evident character. This being so, if the expectation is not adequately grounded to start with, it is very likely to develop into an illusion. And it is to be added that these permanent antic.i.p.ations may have their origin much more in our own wishes or emotional promptings than in fact and experience. The mind undisciplined by scientific training is wont to entertain numerous beliefs of this sort respecting what is now going on in unvisited parts of the world, or what will happen hereafter in the distant future. The remote, and therefore obscure, in s.p.a.ce and in time has always been the favourite region for the projection of pleasant fancies.

Once more, besides these oblique kinds of expectation, I may form other seemingly simple beliefs, to which the term expectation seems less clearly applicable. Thus, on waking in the morning and finding the ground covered with snow, my imagination moves backwards, as in the process of memory, and realizes the spectacle of the softly falling snow-flakes in the hours of the night. The oral communication of others'

experience, including the traditions of the race, enables me to set out from any present point of time, and reconstruct complex chains of experience of vast length lying beyond the bounds of my own personal recollection.

I need not here discuss what the exact nature of such beliefs is. J.S.

Mill identifies them with expectations. Thus, according to him, my belief in the nocturnal snowstorm is the a.s.surance that I should have seen it had I waited up during the night. So my belief in Cicero's oratory resolves itself into the conviction that I should have heard Cicero under certain conditions of time and place, which is identical with my expectation that I shall hear a certain speaker to-morrow if I go to the House of Commons.[140] However this be, the thing to note is that such retrospective beliefs, when once formed, tend to approximate in character to recollections. This is true even of new beliefs in recent events directly made known by present objective consequences or signs, as the snowstorm. For in this case there is commonly no conscious comparison of the present signs with previously known signs, but merely a direct quasi-mnemonic pa.s.sage of mind from the present fact to its antecedent. And it is still more true of long-entertained retrospective beliefs. When, for example, the original grounds of an historical hypothesis are lost sight of, and after the belief has hardened and solidified by time, it comes to look much more like a recollection than an expectation. As a matter of fact, we have seen, when studying the illusions of memory, that our personal experience does become confused with that of others. And one may say that all long-cherished retrospective beliefs tend to become a.s.similated to recollections.

Here then, again, there seems to be room for illusion to arise. Even in the case of a recent past event, directly made known by present objective signs, the mind is liable to err just as in the case of forecasting an immediately approaching event. And such error has all the force of an illusion: its contradiction is almost as great a shock as that of a recollection. When, for example, I enter my house, and see a friend's card lying on the table, I so vividly represent to myself the recent call of my friend, that when I learn the card is an old one which has accidentally been put on the table, I experience a sense of disillusion very similar to that which attends a contradicted perception. The early crude stages of physical science abundantly ill.u.s.trate the genesis of such illusions.