Surprise

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• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  In many cases it is easy to compare the psychic results of the sensational with those of the perceptive process. We then see a marked difference in the way in which the impressed portions of the object are felt, in consequence of being cognized along with the reproduced portion, in the higher state of mind. Their sensible quality changes under our very eye. Take the already-quoted catch, Pas de lieu Rhône que nous: one may read this over and over again without recognizing the sounds to be identical with those of the words paddle your own canoe. As we seize the English meaning the sound itself appears to change. Verbal sounds are usually perceived with their meaning at the moment of being heard. Sometimes, however, the associative irradiations are inhibited for a few moments (the mind being preoccupied with other thoughts) whilst the words linger on the ear as mere echoes of acoustic sensation. Then, usually, their interpretation suddenly occurs. But at that moment one may often surprise a change in the very feel of the word. Our own language would sound very different to us if we heard it without understanding, as we hear a foreign tongue. Rises and falls of voice, odd sibilants and other consonants, would fall on our ear in a way of which we can now form no notion. Frenchmen say that English sounds to them like the gazouillement des oiseaux:—an impression which it certainly makes on no native ear. Many of us English would describe the sound of Russian in similar terms. All of us are conscious of the strong inflections of voice and explosives and gutturals of German speech in a way in which no German can be conscious of them. This is probably the reason why, if we look at an isolated printed word and repeat it long enough, it ends by assuming an entirely unnatural aspect. Let the reader try this with any word on this page. He will soon begin to wonder if it can possibly be the word he has been using all his life with that meaning. It stares at him from the paper like a glass eye, with no speculation in it. Its body is indeed there, but its soul is fled. It is reduced, by this new way of attending to it, to its sensational nudity. We never before attended to it in this way, but habitually got it clad with its meaning the moment we caught sight of it, and rapidly passed from it to the other words of the phrase. We apprehended it, in short, with a cloud of associates, and thus perceiving it, we felt it quite otherwise than as we feel it now divested and alone.

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  "We know that a weak smell or taste may he very diversely interpreted by us, and that the same sensation will now be named as one thing and the next moment as another. Suppose an agreeable smell of flowers in a room: A visitor will notice it, seek to recognize what it is, and at last perceive more and more distinctly that it is the perfume of roses—until after all he discovers a bouquet of violets. Then suddenly he recognizes the violet-smell, and wonders how he could possibly have hit upon the roses.—Just so it is with taste. Try some meat whose visible characteristics are disguised by the mode of cooking, and you will perhaps begin by taking it for venison, and end by being quite certain that it is venison, until you are told that it is mutton; whereupon you get distinctly the mutton flavor.—In this wise one may make a person taste or smell what one will, if one only makes sure that he shall conceive it beforehand as we wish, by saying to him: 'Doesn't that taste just like, etc.?' or 'Doesn't it smell just like, etc.?' One call cheat whole companies in this way; announce, for instance at a meal, that the meat tastes 'high,' and almost every one who is not animated by a spirit of opposition will discover a flavor of putrescence which in reality is not there at all. "In the sense of feeling this phenomenon is less prominent, because we get so close to the object that our sensation of it is never incomplete. Still, examples may be adduced from this sense. On superficially feeling of a cloth, one may confidently declare it for velvet, whilst it is perhaps a long-haired cloth; or a person may perhaps not be able to decide whether he has put on woolen or cotton stockings, and, trying to ascertain this by the feeling on the skin of the feet, he may become aware that he gets the feeling of cotton or wool according as he thinks of the one or the other. When the feeling in our fingers is somewhat blunted by cold, we notice many such phenomena, being then more exposed to confound objects-of touch with one another."[107]

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  "At the time, however, neither she nor the expected event was in my mind; as I said, I was working out trigonometrical formulæ, and I had been working on trigonometry the entire evening. About eleven o'clock, as I sat there buried in sines, cosines, tangents, cotangents, secants, and cosecants, I felt very distinctly upon my left shoulder a touch, and a slight shake, as if somebody had tried to attract my attention by other means and had failed. Without rising I raised my head, and there between me and the door stood my wife, dressed exactly as I last saw her, some five weeks before. As I turned she said: 'It is a little Herman; he has come.' Something more was said, but this is the only sentence I can recall. To make sure that I was not asleep and dreaming, I rose from the chair, pinched myself and walked toward the figure, which disappeared immediately as I rose. I can give no information as to the length of time occupied by this episode, but I know I was awake, in my usual good health. The touch was very distinct, the figure was absolutely perfect, stood about three feet from the door which was closed, and had not been opened during the evening. The sound of the voice was unmistakable, and I should have recognized it as my wife's voice even if I had not turned and had not seen the figure at all. The tone was conversational, just as if she would have said the same words had she been actually standing there. "In regard to myself, I would say, as I have already intimated, I was in my usual good health; I had not been sick before, nor was I after the occurrence, not so much as a headache having afflicted me.

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  Now my first thesis is that this element, discernible in each and every sensation, though more developed in some than in others, is the original sensation of space, out of which all the exact knowledge about space that we afterwards come to have is woven by processes of discrimination, association, and selection. 'Extensity,' as Mr. James Ward calls it[149] on this view, becomes an element in each sensation just as intensity is. The latter every one will admit to be a distinguishable though not separable ingredient of the sensible quality. In like manner extensity, being an entirely peculiar kind of feeling indescribable except in terms of itself, and inseparable in actual experience from some sensational quality which it must accompany, can itself receive no other name than that of sensational element. It must now be noted that the vastness hitherto spoken of is as great in one direction as in another. Its dimensions are so vague that in it there is no question as yet of surface as opposed to depth; 'volume' being the best short name for the sensation in question. Sensations of different orders are roughly comparable, inter se, with respect to their volumes. This shows that the spatial quality in each is identical wherever found, for different qualitative elements, e.g. warmth and odor, are incommensurate. Persons born blind are reported surprised at the largeness with which objects appear to them when their sight is restored. Franz says of his patient cured of cataract: "He saw everything much larger than he had supposed from the idea obtained by his sense of touch. Moving, and especially living, objects appeared very large."[150] Loud sounds have a certain enormousness of feeling. It is impossible to conceive of the explosion of a cannon as fining a small space. In general, sounds seem to occupy all the room between us and their source; and in the case of certain ones, the cricket's song, the whistling of the wind, the roaring of the surf, or a distant railway train, to have no definite starting point. In the sphere of vision we have facts of the same order. 'Glowing' bodies, as Hering says, give us a perception "which seems roomy (raumhaft) in comparison with that of strictly surface color. A glowing iron looks luminous through and through, and so does a flame."[151] A luminous fog, a band of sunshine, affect us in the same way. As Hering urges:

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  Every time he returns to A., from which place business often calls him, he seems to himself as if entering a strange city. He views the monuments, houses, and streets with the same surprise as if he saw them for tile first time. Gradually, however, his memory returns, and he finds himself at home again. When asked to describe the principal public place of the town, he answered, "I know that it is there, but it is impossible to imagine it, and I can tell you nothing about it." He has often drawn the port of A. To-day he vainly tries to trace its principal outlines. Asked to draw a minaret, lie reflects, says it is a square tower, and draws, rudely, four lines, one for ground, one for top, and two for sides. Asked to draw an arcade, he says, " I remember that it contains semi-circular arches, and that two of them meeting at an angle make a vault, but how it looks I am absolutely unable to imagine." The profile of a man which he drew by request was as if drawn by a little child; and yet he confessed that he had been helped to draw it by looking at the bystanders. Similarly lie drew a shapeless scribble for a tree. He can no more remember his wife's and children's faces than he can remember the port of A. Even after being with them some time they seem unusual to him. He forgets his own face, and once spoke to his image in a mirror, taking it for a stranger. He complains of his loss of feeling for colors. "My wife has black hair, this I know; but I can no more recall its color than I can her person and features." This visual amnesia extends to dating objects from his childhood's years—paternal mansion, etc., forgotten.

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  A personal experience of my own seems strongly to corroborate this view. For years I have been familiar, during the act of gaping, with a large, round, smooth sensation in tile region of the throat, a sensation characteristic of gaping and nothing else, but which, although I had often wondered about it, never suggested to my mind the motion of anything. The reader probably knows from his own experience exactly what feeling I mean. It was not till one of my students told me, that I learned its objective cause. If we look into the mirror while gaping, we see that at the moment we have this feeling the hanging palate rises by the contraction of its intrinsic muscles. The contraction of these muscles and the compression of the palatine mucous membrane are what occasion the feeling; and I was at first astonished that, coming from so small an organ, it could appear so voluminous. Now the curious point is this—that no sooner had I learned by the eye its objective space-significance, than I found myself enabled mentally to feel it as a movement upwards of a body in the situation of the uvula. When I now have it, my fancy injects it, so to speak, with the image of the rising uvula; and it absorbs the image easily and naturally. In a word, a, muscular contraction gave me a sensation whereof I was unable during forty years to interpret a motor meaning, of which two glances of the eye made me permanently the master. To my mind no further proof is needed of the fact that muscular contraction, merely as such, need not be perceived directly as so much motion through space.

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  It seems to me that I have no really intuitive discrimination of the different past moments after the experience has gone on some little time, but that back of the 'specious present' they all fuse into a single conception of the kind of thing that has been going on, with a more or less clear sense of the total time it has lasted, this latter being based on an automatic counting of the successive pulses of thought by which the process is from moment to moment recognized as being always the same. Within the few seconds which constitute the specious present there is an intuitive perception of the successive moments. But these moments, of which we have a primary memory-image, are not properly recalled from the past, our knowledge of them is in no way analogous to a memory properly so called. Cf. supra , p. 433. [577] On Intelligence, I. 258-9. [578] Not that mere native tenacity will make a man great. It must be coupled with great passions and great intellect besides. Imbeciles sometimes have extraordinary desultory memory. Drobisch describes (Empirische Psychol., p. 95) the case of a young man whom he examined. He had with difficulty been taught to read and speak. "But if two or three minutes were allowed him to peruse an octave page, he then could spell the single words out from his memory as well as if the book lay open before him. . . . That there was no deception I could test by means of a new Latin law-dissertation which had just come into my hands, which he never could have seen, and of which both subject and language were unknown to him. He read off [mentally] many lines, skipping about too, of the page which had been given him to see, no worse than if the experiment had been made with a child's story." Drobisch describes this case as if it were one of unusual persistence in the visual image ['primary memory,' vide supra , p. 431]. But he adds that the youth 'remembered his pages a long time.' In the Journal of Speculative Philosophy for Jan. 1871 (VI. 6) is an account by Mr. W. D Henkle (together with the stock classic examples of preternatural memory) of an almost blind Pennsylvania farmer who could remember the day of the week on which any date had fallen for forty-two years past, and also the kind of weather it was, and what he was doing on each of more than fifteen thousand days. Pity that such a magnificent faculty as this could not have found more worthy application! What these cases show is that the mere organic retentiveness of a man need bear no definite relation to his other mental powers.

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  These hysterical anæsthesias can be made to disappear more or less completely by various odd processes. It has been recently found that magnets, plates of metal, or the electrodes of a battery, placed against the skin, have this peculiar power. And when one side is relieved in this way, the anæsthesia is often found to have transferred itself to the opposite side, which until then was well. Whether these strange effects of magnets and metals be due to their direct physiological action, or to a prior effect on the patient's mind ('expectant attention' or 'suggestion') is still a mooted question. A still better awakener of sensibility is the hypnotic trance, into which many of these patients can be very easily placed, and in which their lost sensibility not infrequently becomes entirely restored. Such returns of sensibility succeed the times of insensibility and alternate with them. But Messrs. Pierre Janet[200] and A. Binet[201] have shown that during the times of anæsthesia, and coexisting with it, sensibility to the anæsthetic parts is also there, in the form of a secondary consciousness entirely cut off from the primary or normal one, but susceptible of being tapped and made to testify to its existence in various odd ways. Chief amongst these is what M. Janet calls 'the method of distraction .' These hysterics are apt to possess a very narrow field of attention, and to be unable to think of more than one thing at a time. When talking with any person they forget everything else. "When Lucie talked directly with any one," says M. Janet, "she ceased to be able to hear any other person. You may stand behind her, call her by name, shout abuse into her ears, without making her turn round; or place yourself before her, show her objects, touch her, etc., without attracting her notice. When finally she becomes aware of you, she thinks you have just come into the room again, and greets you accordingly. This singular forgetfulness makes her liable to tell all her secrets aloud, unrestrained by the presence of unsuitable auditors." Now M. Janet found in several subjects like this that if he came up behind them whilst they were plunged in conversation with a third party, and addressed them in a whisper, telling them to raise their hand or perform other simple acts, they would obey the order given, although their talking intelligence was quite unconscious of receiving it.

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  Leading them from one thing to another, he made them reply by signs to his whispered questions, and finally made them answer in writing, if a pencil were placed in their hand. The primary consciousness meanwhile went on with the conversation, entirely unaware of these performances on the hand's part. The consciousness which presided over these latter appeared in its turn to be quite as little disturbed by the upper consciousness's concerns. This proof by 'automatic' writing , of a secondary consciousness's existence, is the most cogent and striking one; but a crowd of other facts prove the same thing. If I run through them rapidly, the reader will probably be convinced. The apparently anæsthetic hand of these subjects, for one thing, will often adapt itself discriminatingly to whatever object may be put into it. With a pencil it will make writing movements; into a pair of scissors it will put its fingers and will open and shut them, etc., etc. The primary consciousness, so to call it, is meanwhile unable to say whether or no anything is in the hand, if the latter be hidden from sight. "I put a pair of eyeglasses into Léonie's anæsthetic hand, this hand opens it and raises it towards the nose, but half way thither it enters the field of vision of Léonie, who sees it and stops stupefied: 'Why,' says she, 'I have an eyeglass in my left hand!'" M. Binet found a very curious sort of connection between the apparently anæsthetic skin and the mind in some Salpétrière-subjects. Things placed in the hand were not felt, but thought of (apparently in visual terms) and in no wise referred by the subject to their starting point in the hand's sensation. A key, a knife, placed in the hand occasioned ideas of a key or a knife, but the hand felt nothing. Similarly the subject thought of the number 3, 6, etc., if the hand or finger was bent three or six times by the operator, or if he stroked it three, six, etc., times. In certain individuals there was found a still odder phenomenon, which reminds one of that curious idiosyncrasy of 'colored hearing' of which a few cases have been lately described with great care by foreign writers. These individuals, namely, saw the impression received by the hand, but could not feel it; and the thing seen appeared by no means associated with the hand, but more like an independent vision, which usually interested and surprised the patient. Her hand being hidden by a screen, she was ordered to look at another screen and to tell of any visual image which might project itself thereon.

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  Many people have a remarkable faculty of registering when asleep the flight of time. They will habitually wake up at the same minute day after day, or will wake punctually at an unusual hour determined upon overnight. How can this knowledge of the hour (more accurate often than anything the waking consciousness shows) be possible without mental activity during the interval? Such are what we may call the classical reasons for admitting that the mind is active even when the person afterwards ignores the fact.[199] Of late years, or rather, one may say, of late months, they have been reinforced by a lot of curious observations made on hysterical and hypnotic subjects, which prove the existence of a highly developed consciousness in places where it has hitherto not been suspected at all. These observations throw such a novel light upon human nature that I must give them in some detail. That at least four different and in a certain sense rival observers should agree in the same conclusion justifies us in accepting the conclusion as true. 'Unconsciousness' in Hysterics. One of the most constant symptoms in persons suffering from hysteric disease in its extreme forms consists in alterations of the natural sensibility of various parts and organs of the body. Usually the alteration is in the direction of defect, or anæsthesia. One or both eyes are blind, or color-blind, or there is hemianopsia (blindness to one half the field of view), or the field is contracted. Hearing, taste, smell may similarly disappear, in part or in totality. Still more striking are the cutaneous anæsthesias. The old witch-finders looking for the 'devil's seals' learned well the existence of those insensible patches on the skin of their victims, to which the minute physical examinations of recent medicine have but recently attracted attention again. They may be scattered anywhere, but are very apt to affect one side of the body. Not infrequently they affect an entire lateral half, from head to foot; and the insensible skin of, say, the left side will then be found separated from the naturally sensitive skin of the right by a perfectly sharp line of demarcation down the middle of the front and back. Sometimes, most remarkable of all, the entire skin, hands, feet, face, everything, and the mucous membranes, muscles and joints so far as they can be explored, become completely insensible without the other vital functions becoming gravely disturbed.

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  The next thing to be noticed is this, that every one of the bodily changes, whatsoever it be, is FELT, acutely or obscurely, the moment it occurs. If the reader has never paid attention to this matter, he will be both interested and astonished to learn how many different local bodily feelings he can detect in himself as characteristic of his various emotional moods. It would be perhaps too much to expect him to arrest the tide of any strong gust of passion for the sake of any such curious analysis as this; but he can observe more tranquil states, and that may be assumed here to be true of the greater which is shown to be true of the less. Our whole cubic capacity is sensibly alive; and each morsel of it contributes its pulsations of feeling, dim or sharp, pleasant, painful, or dubious, to that sense of personality that every one of us unfailingly carries with him. It is surprising what little items give accent to these complexes of sensibility. When worried by any slight trouble, one may find that the focus of one's bodily consciousness is the contraction, often quite inconsiderable, of the eyes and brows. When momentarily embarrassed, it is something in the pharynx that compels either a swallow, a clearing of the throat, or a slight cough; and so on for as many more instances as might be named. Our concern here being with the general view rather than with the details, I will not linger to discuss these, but, assuming the point admitted that every change that occurs must be felt, I will pass on.

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  We shall learn in the chapter on Space that our feelings of our own movement are principally due to the sensibility of our rotating joints. Sometimes by fixing the attention, say on our elbow-joint, we can feel the movement in the joint itself; but we always are simultaneously conscious of the path which during the movement our finger-tips describe through the air, and yet these same finger-tips themselves are in no way physically modified by the motion. A blow on our ulnar nerve behind the elbow is felt both there and in the fingers. Refrigeration of the elbow produces pain in the fingers. Electric currents passed through nerve-trunks, whether of cutaneous or of more special sensibility (such as the optic nerve), give rise to sensations which are vaguely localized beyond the nerve-tracts traversed. Persons whose legs or arms have been amputated are, as is well known, apt to preserve an illusory feeling of the lost hand or foot being there. Even when they do not have this feeling constantly, it may be occasionally brought back. This sometimes is the result of exciting electrically the nerve-trunks buried in the stump. "I recently faradized," says Dr. Mitchell, "a case of disarticulated shoulder without warning my patient of the possible result. For two year she had altogether ceased to feel the limb. As the current affected the brachial plexus of nerves he suddenly cried aloud, 'Oh the hand,—the hand!' and attempted to seize the missing member. The phantom I had conjured up swiftly disappeared, but no spirit could have more amazed the man, so real did it seem."[46] Now the apparent position of the lost extremity varies. Often the foot seems on the ground, or follows the position of the artificial foot, where one is used. Sometimes where the arm is lost the elbow will seem bent, and the hand in a fixed position on the breast. Sometimes, again, the position is non-natural, and the hand will seem to bud straight out of the shoulder, or the foot to be on the same level with the knee of the remaining leg. Sometimes, again, the position is vague; and sometimes it is ambiguous, as in another patient of Dr. Weir Mitchell's who "lost his leg at the age of eleven, and remembers that the foot by degrees approached, and at last reached the knee. When he began to wear an artificial leg it reassumed in time its old position, and he is never at present aware of the leg as shortened, unless for some time he talks and thinks of the stump, and of the missing leg, when . . . the direction of attention to the part causes a feeling of discomfort, and the subjective sensation of active and unpleasant movement of the toes. With these feelings returns at once the delusion of the foot as being placed at the knee."

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  From ordinary images of memory and fancy, pseudo-hallucinations differ in being much more vivid, minute, detailed, steady, abrupt, and spontaneous, in the sense that all feeling of our own activity in producing them is lacking. Dr. Kandinsky had a patient who, after taking opium or haschisch, had abundant pseudo-hallucinations and hallucinations. As he also had strong visualizing power and was an educated physician, the three sorts of phenomena could be easily compared. Although projected outwards (usually not farther than the limit of distinctest vision, a foot or so) the pseudo-hallucinations lacked the character of objective reality which the hallucinations possessed, but, unlike the pictures of imagination, it was almost impossible to produce them at will, most of the 'voices' which people hear (whether they give rise to delusions or not) are pseudo-hallucinations. They are described as 'inner' voices, although their character is entirely unlike the inner speech of the subject with himself. I know two persons who hear such inner voices making unforeseen remarks whenever they grow quiet and listen for them. They are a very common incident of delusional insanity, and at last grow into vivid hallucinations. The latter are comparatively frequent occurrences in sporadic form; end certain individuals are liable to have them often. From the results of the 'Census of Hallucinations,' which was begun by Edmund Gurney, it would appear that, roughly speaking, one person at least in every ten is likely to have had a vivid hallucination at some time in his life.[129] The following cases from healthy people will give an idea of what these hallucinations are: "When a girl of eighteen, I was one evening engaged in a very painful discussion with an elderly person. My distress was so great that I took up a thick ivory knitting-needle that was lying on the mantelpiece of the parlor and broke it into small pieces as I talked. In the midst of the discussion I was very wishful to know the opinion of a brother with whom I had an unusually close relationship. I turned round and saw him sitting at the further side of a centre-table, with his arms folded (an unusual position with him), but, to my dismay, I perceived from the sarcastic expression of his mouth that he was not in sympathy with me, was not 'taking my side,' as I should then have expressed it. The surprise cooled me, and the discussion was dropped. "Some minutes after, having occasion to speak to my brother, I turned towards him, but he was gone. I inquired when he left the room, and was told that he had not been in it, which I did not believe, thinking that he had come in for a minute and had gone out without being noticed. About an hour and a half afterwards he appeared, and convinced me, with some trouble, that he had never been near the house that evening. He is still alive and well." Here is another case:

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  There is an illusion of movement of the opposite sort, with which every one is familiar at railway stations. Habitually, when we ourselves move forward, our entire field of view glides backward over our retina. When our movement is due to that of the windowed carriage, car, or boat in which we sit, all stationary objects visible through the window give us a sensation of gliding in the opposite direction. Hence, whenever we get this sensation, of a window with all objects visible through it moving in one direction, we react upon it in our customary way, and perceive a stationary field of view, over which the window, and we ourselves inside of it, are passing by a motion of our own. Consequently when another train comes alongside of ours in a station, and fills the entire window, and, after standing still awhile, begins to glide away, we judge that it is our train which is moving, and that the other train is still. If, however, we catch a glimpse of any part of the station through the windows, or between the cars, of the other train, the illusion of our own movement instantly disappears, and we perceive the other train to be the one in motion. This, again, is but making the usual and probable inference from our sensation.[98] Another illusion due to movement is explained by Helmholtz. Most wayside objects, houses, trees, etc., look small when seen out of the windows of a swift train. This is because we perceive them in the first instance unduly near. And we perceive them unduly near because of their extra-ordinarily rapid parallactic flight backwards. When we ourselves more forward all objects glide backwards, as aforesaid; but the nearer they are, the more rapid is this apparent translocation. Relative rapidity of passage back-wards is thus so familiarly associated with nearness that when we feel it we perceive nearness. But with a given size of retinal image the nearer an object is, the smaller do judge its actual size to be. Hence in the train, the faster we go, the nearer do the trees and houses seem, and nearer they seem, the smaller do they look.[99]

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  Finally, Fechner speaks of the impossibility of attending to both after-images and imagination-images at once, even when they are of the same object and might be expected to combine. All these differences are true of Fechner; but many of them would be untrue of other persons. I quote them as a type of observation which any reader with sufficient patience to repeat. To them may be added, as a universal proposition, that after-images seem larger if we project them on a distant screen, and smaller if project them on a near one, whilst no such change takes place in mental pictures Fechner's intention was independently executed by Mr. Galton, the publication of whose results in 1880 may be said to have made an era in descriptive Psychology. "It is not necessary," says Galton, "to trouble the reader with my early tentative steps. After the inquiry had been fairly started it took the form of submitting a certain number of printed questions to a large number of persons. There is hardly any more difficult task than that of framing questions which are not likely to be misunderstood, which admit of easy reply, and which cover the ground of inquiry. I did my best in these respects, without forgetting the most important part of all-namely, to tempt my correspondents to write freely in fuller explanation of their replies, and on cognate topics as well. These separate letters have proved more instructive and interesting by far than the replies to the set questions. "The first group of the rather long series of queries related to the illumination, definition, and coloring of the mental image, and were framed thus: "Before addressing yourself to any of the Questions on the opposite page, think of some definite object—suppose it is your breakfast-table as you sat down to it this morning—and consider carefully the picture that rises before your mind's eye. " '1. Illumination.—Is the image dim or fairly clear? Is its brightness comparable to that of the actual scene? " '2. Definition.—Are all the objects pretty well defined at the same timid, or is the place of sharpest definition at any one moment more contracted than it is in a real scene? " '3. Coloring. -Are the colors of the china, of the toast, bread-crust, mustard, meat, parsley, or whatever may have been on the table, quite distinct and natural?' "The earliest results of my inquiry amazed me. I had begun by questioning friends in the scientific world, as they were the most likely class of men to give accurate answers concerning this faculty of visualizing, to which novelists and poets continually allude, which has left an abiding mark on the vocabularies of every language, and which supplies the material out of which dreams and the well-known hallucinations of sick people are built.

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  [image file=image_348.jpg] Thus the faintest sensations will give rise to the perception of definite things if only they resemble those which the things are wont to arouse. In fact, a sensation must be strong and distinct in order not to suggest an object and, if it is a non-descript feeling, really to seem one. The auræ of epilepsy, globes of light, fiery vision, roarings in the ears, the sensations which electric currents give rise to when passed through head, these are unfigured because they are strong. Weaker feelings of the same sort would probably suggest objects. Many years ago, after reading Maury's book, Le Sommeil et les Rêves, I began for the first time to observe ideas which faintly hit through the mind at all times, visions, etc., disconnected with the main stream of thought, but discernible to an attention on the watch for them. A horse's head, a coil of rope, an anchor, are, for example, ideas which have come to me unsolicited whilst I have been writing these latter lines. They can often be explained by subtle links of association, often not at all. But I have not a few times been surprised, after noting some such idea, to find, on shutting my eyes, an after-image left on the retina by some bright or dark object recently looked at, and which had evidently suggested the idea. 'Evidently,' I say, because the general shape, size, and position of object thought—of and of after-image were the same, although the idea had details which the retinal image lacked. We shall probably never know just what part retinal after-images play in determining the train of our thoughts. Judging by my own experiences I should suspect it of being not insignificant.[93] ILLUSIONS. Let us now, for brevity's sake, treat A and B in Fig, 47 as if they stood for objects instead of brain-processes. And let us furthermore suppose that A and B are, both of them, objects which might probably excite the sensation which I have called 'this,' but that on the present occasion A and not B is the one which actually does so. If, then, on this occasion 'this' suggests A and not B, the result is a correct perception. But if, on the contrary, 'this' suggests B and not A, the result is a false perception, or, as it is technically called, an illusion. But the process is the same, whether the perception be true or false.

• From Tropic of Cancer (1934)

  He was looking for the exit, and he thought while he was at it, I suppose, that he would take a good squint at the holy of holies, get a close-up on it, as it were. We had gotten safely by and were marching toward a crack of light which must have been the way out when a priest suddenly stepped out of the gloom and blocked our path. Wanted to know where we were going and what we were doing. We told him politely enough that we were looking for the exit. We said “exit” because at the moment we were so flabbergasted that we couldn’t think of the French for exit. Without a word of response he took us firmly by the arm and, opening the door, a side door it was, he gave us a push and out we tumbled into the blinding light of day. It happened so suddenly and unexpectedly that when we hit the sidewalk we were in a daze. We walked a few paces, blinking our eyes, and then instinctively we both turned round; the priest was still standing on the steps, pale as a ghost and scowling like the devil himself. He must have been sore as hell. Later, thinking back on it, I couldn’t blame him for it. But at that moment, seeing him with his long skirts and the little skull cap on his cranium, he looked so ridiculous that I burst out laughing. I looked at Fillmore and he began to laugh too. For a full minute we stood there laughing right in the poor bugger’s face. He was so bewildered, I guess, that for a moment he didn’t know what to do; suddenly, however, he started down the steps on the run, shaking his fist at us as if he were in earnest. When he swung out of the enclosure he was on the gallop. By this time some preservative instinct warned me to get a move on. I grabbed Fillmore by the coat sleeve and started to run. He was saying, like an idiot: “No, no! I won’t run!”—“Come on!” I yelled, “we’d better get out of here. That guy’s mad clean through.” And off we ran, beating it as fast as our legs would carry us. On the way to Dijon, still laughing about the affair, my thoughts reverted to a ludicrous incident, of a somewhat similar nature, which occurred during my brief sojourn in Florida. It was during the celebrated boom when, like thousands of others, I was caught with my pants down.

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  These were themes that many conservative Western politicians had repeatedly used sixty years earlier as various countries dismantled their penal legislation on homosexuality. Altogether the new Russian moral panic was more reminiscent of the punitive atmosphere of Victorian England than anything ‘traditionally’ Russian. In fact, Westerners visiting Muscovy in the seventeenth century had remarked in surprise on the degree of open toleration for both male and female same-sex behaviour; they noted

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  ORTHODOXY ’ Running in parallel to these momentous developments in marriage practice was the prolonged ‘Iconoclastic Controversy’ in Eastern Christianity. The ‘icon’, a sacred image normally presented as a painting on a wooden panel, is now so much an essential part of Orthodox Christian identity that it may come as a surprise that in the eighth and ninth centuries icons were at the centre of a deeply divisive conflict in the Orthodox world about their place in its worship life. The issue was an old one in Christianity. Which of its two inherited cultural impulses should it follow: the Jewish tradition with its strong prejudice against sacred imagery, or that of the Hellenistic world, which delighted in creating images of the divine? The coming of Islam in the seventh century posed the problem once more in a new and more acute form, for the Prophet and his successors were determined foes of any image in a sacred context. And Islam had been horrifyingly successful: did that mean that God favoured Muslim iconophobia? That was certainly the conclusion of the Byzantine military commander who in 717 became Emperor Leo III (known as ‘the Isaurian’, coming from a frontier province of Asia Minor). Shocked by another apparent sign of God’s displeasure in a massive volcanic eruption in the Aegean archipelago of Santorini in 726, Leo implemented what was at first a fairly restricted programme of removing prominent icons from imperial buildings and whitewashing over church mosaics. [32] His son Constantine V (reigned 741–75), another successful soldier, extended the iconoclastic campaign into persecuting ‘iconophiles’, the defenders of sacred imagery: he had one of them whipped to death in the Hippodrome of Constantinople. [33] Images were destroyed in huge numbers, as is proved by how few icons dating to before this era survive to us outside the remote haven of the monastery of St Catherine in Sinai, which the iconoclasts never reached. Archaeology has revealed the systematic removal of images from mosaics on both sides of the frontier between Byzantium and the Caliphate. [34] Both Church and imperial government were deeply damaged by this bitterness. One feature of the long-drawn-out dispute, finally only settled by an imperial decision in 843, was that the turning points in favour of icons were the work of two successive empresses. Constantine V’s daughter-in-law Irene, whose blinding of her son Constantine VI left her as the only reigning Empress in Byzantine history (sole reign 797–802), had gone so far as to summon an Oecumenical Council in the name of that unfortunate teenager, at that stage still in possession of his eyes, and this second Council of Nicaea (787) systematically reversed iconoclast policies. For the time being the shift was temporary, since Irene’s unmaternal behaviour, combined with the alarming diplomatic prospect that she might make a second marriage, to the Western Latin monarch Charlemagne, led to her deposition and exile in 802.

• From The Master and Margarita (1966)

  Koroviev mumbled good-naturedly, sprawling on the chair. ‘I understand . . .’ Archibald Archibaldovich replied meaningfully, closing his eyes. Seeing the way the chief of the restaurant treated the rather dubious visitors, the waiters laid aside their suspicions and got seriously down to business. One was already offering a match to Behemoth, who had taken a butt from his pocket and put it in his mouth, the other raced up clinking with green glass and at their places arranged goblets, tumblers, and those thin-walled glasses from which it is so nice to drink seltzer under the awning . . . no, skipping ahead, let us say: it used to be so nice to drink seltzer under the awning of the unforgettable Griboedov veranda. ‘I might recommend a little fillet of hazel-grouse,’ Archibald Archibaldovich murmured musically. The guest in the cracked pincenez fully approved the commander of the brig’s suggestions and gazed at him benevolently through the useless bit of glass. The fiction writer Petrakov-Sukhovey, dining at the next table with his wife, who was finishing a pork chop, noticed with the keenness of observation proper to all writers the wooing of Archibald Archibaldovich, and was quite, quite surprised. And his wife, a very respectable lady, even simply became jealous of Koroviev over the pirate, and even rapped with her teaspoon, as if to say: why are we kept waiting? . . . It’s time the ice cream was served. What’s the matter? . . . However, after sending Mrs Petrakov a seductive smile, Archibald Archibaldovich dispatched a waiter to her, but did not leave his dear guests himself. Ah, how intelligent Archibald Archibaldovich was! And his powers of observation were perhaps no less keen than those of the writers themselves! Archibald Archibaldovich knew about the séance at the Variety, and about many other events of those days; he had heard, but, unlike the others, had not closed his ears to, the word ‘checkered’ and the word ‘cat’. Archibald Archibaldovich guessed at once who his visitors were. And, having guessed, naturally did not start quarrelling with them. And that Sofya Pavlovna was a good one! To come up with such a thing—barring the way to the veranda for those two! Though what could you expect of her! . . . Haughtily poking her little spoon into the slushy ice cream, Mrs Petrakov, with displeased eyes, watched the table in front of the two motley buffoons become overgrown with dainties as if by magic. Shiny clean lettuce leaves were already sticking from a bowl of fresh caviar . . . an instant later a sweating silver bucket appeared, brought especially on a separate little table . . .