Surprise

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From How the Bible Actually Works (2019)

  Paul, as he tends to, takes this a step farther. The Spirit of God now dwells in all believers, so that Paul can refer to the church at Corinth as a whole as God’s temple (1 Cor. 3:16) and each person’s body also as a temple of the Holy Spirit (6:19). And in the final book of the New Testament, Revelation, the end goal of the people of God is to dwell with God intimately and directly, without any need for a temple (21:22). For the Jesus movement, the Temple’s ultimate usefulness was in foreshadowing the presence of God in Jesus and his followers. This was not where the story of Israel was supposed to go. Ezekiel, besides talking about sour grapes, had a vision of the glory of the future Temple that spans nine chapters (40–48). It is rather detailed, as you can imagine, but the punch line is that this Temple will be quite a sight, truly fitting for God’s glory. As God says, This is the place of my throne and the place for the soles of my feet, where I will reside among the people of Israel forever (43:7). The reimagining of God in light of the gospel has no need of this structure. The plan has changed. Christians today might take this sort of thing for granted. Temples are not part of our experience, but in the first century the Temple was a thousand-year- old symbol of God’s actual presence. Nothing could really approximate for us today this first-century upheaval— perhaps removing any and all Christian symbols from our houses of worship: stained glass, crosses, crucifixes, bells, organs, icons, altars, pulpits, and lecterns. We might say, “That’s okay. We’ll miss them, but we still have Jesus.” And that’s the point, really. What a very Christian thing to say. Christians have never had a Temple in Jerusalem where God’s glory dwelt. Let’s not lose the big picture here. The really central point in all this is that the biblically rooted tradition of a holy sanctuary for God shifts from a structure to a person—and then that person’s followers. That sort of thinking only came about because the circumstances demanded it. Jesus inspired a major midcourse change in direction. What eventually became “Christianity” began as a Jewish sect—a sect that stretched the boundaries of Judaism to its limit. Eventually, like Jesus’s wineskins, it stretched those boundaries too far. And speaking of boundaries . . . This Land Is My Land You’re probably sick of hearing it, but this is my book and I’ll say it again for

• From Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011)

  experiences in which we saw one object in motion touching another object, which immediately starts to move, often (but not always) in the same direction. This is what happens when a billiard ball hits another, and it is also what happens when you knock over a vase by brushing against it. Michotte had a different idea: he argued that we see causality, just as directly as we see color. To make his point, he created episodes in which a black square drawn on paper is seen in motion; it comes into contact with another square, which immediately begins to move. The observers know that there is no real physical contact, but they nevertheless have a powerful “illusion of causality.” If the second object starts moving instantly, they describe it as having been “launched” by the first. Experiments have shown that six-month-old infants see the sequence of events as a cause-effect scenario, and they indicate surprise when the sequence is altered. We are evidently ready from birth to have impressions of causality, which do not depend on reasoning about patterns of causation. They are products of System 1. In 1944, at about the same time as Michotte published his demonstrations of physical causality, the psychologists Fritz Heider and Mary-Ann Simmel used a method similar to Michotte’s to demonstrate the perception of intentional causality. They made a film, which lasts all of one minute and forty seconds, in which you see a large triangle, a small triangle, and a circle moving around a shape that looks like a schematic view of a house with an open door. Viewers see an aggressive large triangle bullying a smaller triangle, a terrified circle, the circle and the small triangle joining forces to defeat the bully; they also observe much interaction around a door and then an explosive finale. The perception of intention and emotion is irresistible; only people afflicted by autism do not experience it. All this is entirely in your mind, of course. Your mind is ready and even eager to identify agents, assign them personality traits and specific intentions, and view their actions as expressing individual propensities. Here again, the evidence is that we are born prepared to make intentional attributions: infants under one year old identify bullies and victims, and expect a pursuer to follow the most direct path in attempting to catch whatever it is chasing. The experience of freely willed action is quite separate from physical causality. Although it is your hand that picks up the salt, you do not think of the event in terms of a chain of physical causation. You experience it as caused by a decision that a disembodied you made, because you wanted to add salt to your food. Many people find it natural to describe their soul as the source and the cause of their actions. The psychologist Paul Bloom, writing in The Atlantic in 2005, presented the provocative claim that our inborn readiness to separate physical and intentional causality explains the near universality of religious

• From On Becoming a Person: A Therapist's View of Psychotherapy (1961)

  Title : On Becoming a Person: A Therapist's View of Psychotherapy Author: Rogers, Carl R. ASIN : B00AD9YL6C [image "title page" file=Image00000.jpg] ContentsTitle Page Contents Copyright Introduction To the Reader SPEAKING PERSONALLY “This is Me” HOW CAN I BE OF HELP? Some Hypotheses Regarding the Facilitation of Personal Growth The Characteristics of a Helping Relationship What We Know About Psychotherapy—Objectively and Subjectively THE PROCESS OF BECOMING A PERSON Some of the Directions Evident in Therapy What It Means to Become a Person A Process Conception of Psychotherapy A PHILOSOPHY OF PERSONS “To Be That Self Which One Truly Is”: A Therapist’s View of Personal Goals A Therapist’s View of the Good Life: The Fully Functioning Person GETTING AT THE FACTS: THE PLACE OF RESEARCH IN PSYCHOTHERAPY Persons or Science? A Philosophical Question Personality Change in Psychotherapy Client-Centered Therapy in Its Context of Research WHAT ARE THE IMPLICATIONS FOR LIVING? Personal Thoughts on Teaching and Learning Significant Learning: In Therapy and in Education Student-Centered Teaching as Experienced by a Participant The Implications of Client-Centered Therapy for Family Life Dealing With Breakdowns in Communication—Interpersonal and Intergroup A Tentative Formulation of a General Law of Interpersonal Relationships Toward a Theory of Creativity THE BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES AND THE PERSON The Growing Power of the Behavioral Sciences The Place of the Individual in the New World of the Behavioral Sciences Appendix Acknowledgments Index About the Author Connect with HMH Footnotes Copyright © 1961 by Carl R. Rogers Copyright © renewed 1989 by Carl R. Rogers Introduction copyright © 1995 by Peter D. Kramer, M.D. All rights reserved For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to trade.permissions@hmhco.com or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016. hmhbooks.com Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available. ISBN : 978-0-395-75531-0 ISBN : 0-395-75531-X eISBN 978-0-544-08666-1 v10.1019 IntroductionTHE PUBLICATION, IN 1961, of On Becoming a Person brought Carl Rogers unexpected national recognition. A researcher and clinician, Rogers had believed he was addressing psychotherapists and only after the fact discovered that he “was writing for people —nurses, housewives, people in the business world, priests, ministers, teachers, youth.” The book sold millions of copies when million was a rare number in publishing. Rogers was, for the decade that followed, the Psychologist of America, likely to be consulted by the press on any issue that concerned the mind, from creativity to self-knowledge to the national character. Certain ideas that Rogers championed have become so widely accepted that it is difficult to recall how fresh, even revolutionary, they were in their time. Freudian psychoanalysis, the prevailing model of mind at mid-century, held that human drives—sex and aggression—were inherently selfish, constrained at a price and with difficulty by the forces of culture. Cure, in the Freudian model, came through a relationship that frustrated the patient, fostering anxiety necessary for the patient to accept the analyst’s difficult truths.

• From A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Epistle to the Galatians (1921)

  i. Proposition: Paul received ike gospel not from men, but immediately from God (ill» 12). Beginning with these verses, the apostle addresses him- self to the refutation of the charges and criticisms of the judaising teachers, and to the re-establishment of himself and his gospel in the confidence of the Galatians; and first of all, doubtless as against an assertion of his opponents that he had never received (from Jerusalem) a commission authorising him to set himself up as a teacher of the religion of Jesus, he affirms his entire independence of all human authority or commission, and his possession of his gospel by virtue of a divine revelation of Jesus Christ, llPor I declare to you^ brethren, that the gospel that was preached $y me is not according to man; nfor neither did I receive it from man, nor was I taught it, but it came to me through revelation of Jesus Christ. 11. rWpl£o> <y%> v/MV) &Se7uf>of9 " For I declare to you, breth- ren," The verb ryvo*pC%®> suggests a somewhat formal or solemn assertion. Cf. i Cor. 12* is1 2 Cor. 8* Eph. i9, the similar ex- pression ov $^X«*> ayvoelv in Rom, iu nn i Cor. zo1 12* 2 Cor* x* x Thcs. 4", and M. and M. Voc. on yw*pt£<d and <ytvdxT/cG>m The assertion that follows is in effect the proposition to the prov- ing of which the whole argument of x**-2n is directed. This relation of vv,sl»IS to what follows remains the same whether we read <W or ydp* Only in the latter case the apostle (as in Rom. ifi) has attached Ms leading proposition to a preceding statement as a justification of it, not, however, of v.10, which is a appendix to w, M and almost parenthetical, but of the whole vv. **ff as an expression of Ms surprise at their and his stem denunciation of those who are 36 GALATIANS leading them astray. See a somewhat similar use of <ydp at the beginning of a new division of the argument in Rom. i11; cf. also Rom. i16- 17. The word "brethren/' aS€\<f>o£s doubtless here, as almost invariably in Paul's epistles, signifies fellow- Christians. See more fully in fine print below, and on v. 2. F(£p after yv&>pfi;ci> is the reading of Jt*BD*FG 33 d f g Vg. Dam. Victorin. Hier. Aug.; $i: K*ADb«i<s KLP, the major portion of thf cursives. Syr, (psh. hard, pal) Boh. Orlafc- Chr. Kuthal. Cyr. Thdrt.

• From Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011)

  An observer, casually watching the patrons at a neighboring table in a fashionable restaurant, notices that the first guest to taste the soup winces, as if in pain. The normality of a multitude of events will be altered by this incident. It is now unsurprising for the guest who first tasted the soup to startle violently when touched by a waiter; it is also unsurprising for another guest to stifle a cry when tasting soup from the same tureen. These events and many others appear more normal than they would have otherwise, but not necessarily because they confirm advance expectations. Rather, they appear normal because they recruit the original episode, retrieve it from memory, and are interpreted in conjunction with it. Imagine yourself the observer at the restaurant. You were surprised by the first guest’s unusual reaction to the soup, and surprised again by the startled response to the waiter’s touch. However, the second abnormal event will retrieve the first from memory, and both make sense together. The two events fit into a pattern, in which the guest is an exceptionally tense person. On the other hand, if the next thing that happens after the first guest’s grimace is that another customer rejects the soup, these two surprises will be linked and the soup will surely be blamed. “How many animals of each kind did Moses take into the ark?” The number of people who detect what is wrong with this question is so small that it has been dubbed the “Moses illusion.” Moses took no animals into the ark; Noah did. Like the incident of the wincing soup eater, the Moses illusion is readily explained by norm theory. The idea of animals going into the ark sets up a biblical context, and Moses is not abnormal in that context. You did not positively expect him, but the mention of his name is not surprising. It also helps that Moses and Noah have the same vowel sound and number of syllables. As with the triads that produce cognitive ease, you unconsciously detect associative coherence between “Moses” and “ark” and so quickly accept the question. Replace Moses with George W. Bush in this sentence and you will have a poor political joke but no illusion. When something cement does not fit into the current context of activated ideas, the system detects an abnormality, as you just experienced. You had no particular idea of what was coming after something , but you knew when the word cement came that it was abnormal in that sentence. Studies of brain responses have shown that violations of normality are detected with astonishing speed and subtlety. In a recent experiment, people heard the sentence “Earth

• From On Becoming a Person: A Therapist's View of Psychotherapy (1961)

  She opens the thirtieth hour in this way. C: Well, I made a very remarkable discovery. I know it’s—(laughs ) I found out that you actually care how this thing goes. (Both laugh) It gave me the feeling, it’s sort of well—“maybe I’ll let you get in the act,” sort of thing. It’s—again you see, on an examination sheet, I would have had the correct answer, I mean—but it suddenly dawned on me that in the—client-counselor kind of thing, you actually care what happens to this thing. And it was a revelation, a—not that. That doesn’t describe it. It was a—well, the closest I can come to it is a kind of relaxation, a—not a letting down, but a—(pause) more of a straightening out without tension if that means anything. I don’t know. T: Sounds as though it isn’t as though this was a new idea, but it was a new experience of really feeling that I did care and if I get the rest of that, sort of a willingness on your part to let me care. C: Yes. This letting the counselor and his warm interest into her life was undoubtedly one of the deepest features of therapy in this case. In an interview following the conclusion of therapy she spontaneously mentions this experience as being the outstanding one. What does it mean? The phenomenon is most certainly not one of transference and countertransference. Some experienced psychologists who had undergone psychoanalysis had the opportunity of observing the development of the relationship in another case than the one cited. They were the first to object to the use of the terms transference and countertransference to describe the phenomena. The gist of their remarks was that this is something which is mutual and appropriate, where transference or countertransference are phenomena which are characteristically one-way and inappropriate to the realities of the situation. Certainly one reason why this phenomena is occurring more frequently in our experience is that as therapists we have become less afraid of our positive (or negative) feelings toward the client. As therapy goes on the therapist’s feeling of acceptance and respect for the client tends to change to something approaching awe as he sees the valiant and deep struggle of the person to be himself. There is, I think, within the therapist, a profound experience of the underlying commonality—should we say brotherhood—of man. As a result he feels toward the client a warm, positive, affectional reaction. This poses a problem for the client who often, as in this case, finds it difficult to accept the positive feeling of another. Yet once accepted the inevitable reaction on the part of the client is to relax, to let the warmth of liking by another person reduce the tension and fear involved in facing life.

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

  The interior of one's mouth-cavity feels larger when explored by the tongue than when looked at. The crater of a newly-extracted tooth, and the movements of a loose tooth in its socket, feel quite monstrous. A midge buzzing against the drum of the ear will often seem as big as a butterfly. The spatial sensibility of the tympanic membrane has hitherto been very little studied, though the subject will well repay much trouble. If we approach it by introducing into the outer ear some small object like the tip of a rolled-up tissue-paper lamplighter, we are surprised at the large radiating sensation which its presence gives us, end at the sense of clearness and openness which comes when it is removed. It is immaterial to inquire whether the far-reaching sensation here be due to actual irradiation upon distant nerves or not. We are considering now, not the objective causes of the spatial feeling, but its subjective varieties, and the experiment shows that the same object gives more of it to the inner than to the outer cuticle of the ear. The pressure of the air in the tympanic cavity upon the membrane gives an astonishingly large sensation. We increase the pressure by holding our nostrils and closing our mouth and forcing air through our Eustachian tubes by an expiratory effort; and we can diminish it by either inspiring or swallowing under the same conditions of closed mouth and nose. In either case me get a large round tridimensional sensation inside of the head, which seems as if it must come from the affection of an organ much larger than the tympanic membrane, whose surface hardly exceeds that of one's little-finger-nail.

• From How the Bible Actually Works (2019)

  of the law (Rom. 10:4)—meaning not the rejection of Law as such, but the end goal that the Law was driving toward all along. Paul doesn’t reject the Law of Moses, as some in Christian history have thought, but he does marginalize it, decenter it, by placing at the center of God’s plan for the world not our obedience to Torah, but Christ’s obedience to go through with the crucifixion to defeat Sin and God’s raising of Jesus from the dead to defeat Death. Am I missing something, or is this a major shift, folks? * You don’t get to Paul’s gospel simply from reading the Old Testament. You need to be convinced, first, that Jesus is the way, and then reimagine God and the faith of old to account for it , which is to say, to read the moment—the Jesus moment— and adjust the tradition in light of it. That’s the message Paul delivered, and judging from his letters he got a lot of resistance. Again, let’s not be surprised about that. In a way, it’s easy for Christians today to say that the poor blokes just didn’t get it. But in another way, we need to understand why. Paul was expecting a lot—a rethinking of the heart of the tradition, the role of Torah. Going Off Script The whole matter comes to a head with two specific laws that keep coming up in Paul’s letters: circumcision and not eating unclean food. God commanded that Abraham circumcise himself, his son Isaac, and any other males of his household and that circumcising males on the eighth day from then on would be an everlasting covenant , which sounds serious, because it is (see Gen. 17). Failure to keep the command would mean being cut off from the people, which probably means something like excommunication, but in any case is one of the more delightful puns you will read anywhere. The laws about clean and unclean animals are given in Leviticus 11 and Deuteronomy 14, commands from God to Moses on Mt. Sinai, and are no more negotiable than any other commands. These two laws in particular were central to Jewish identity in Paul’s day. They had become social badges of honor to distinguish Jews from Gentiles, something concrete to hang on to amid the persistent religious chaos introduced by centuries of Greek and Roman ways. That’s why I wear my Yankees jersey in Phillies country. I do it, at great risk to myself, to let the world—the world, mind

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

  The first mode is called by Mr. Spencer direct, the second indirect, equilibration. Both equilibrations must of course be natural and physical processes, but they belong to entirely different physical spheres. The direct influences are obvious and accessible things. The causes of variation in the young are, on the other hand, molecular and hidden. The direct influences are the animal's 'experiences,' in the widest sense of the term. Where what is influenced by them is the mental organism, they are conscious experiences, and become the objects as well as the causes of their effects. That is, the effect consists in a tendency of the experience itself to be remembered, or to have its elements thereafter coupled in imagination just as they were coupled in the experience. In the diagram these experiences are represented by the o's exclusively. The x's, on the other hand, stand for the indirect causes of mental modification—causes of which we are not immediately conscious as such, and which are not the direct objects of the effects they produce. Some of them are molecular accidents before birth; some of them are collateral and remote combinations, unintended combinations, one might say, of more direct effects wrought in the unstable and intricate brain-tissue. Such a result is unquestionably the susceptibility to music, which some individuals possess at the present day. It has no zoological utility; it corresponds to no object in the natural environment; it is a pure incident of having a hearing organ, an incident depending on such instable and inessential conditions that one brother may have it and another brother not. Just so with the susceptibility to sea-sickness, which, so far from being engendered by long experience of its 'object' (if a heaving deck can be called its object) is erelong annulled thereby. Our higher æsthetic, moral, and intellectual life seems made up of affections of this collateral and incidental sort, which have entered the mind by the back stairs, as it were, or rather have not entered the mind at all, but got surreptitiously born in the house. No one can successfully treat of psychogenesis, or the factors of mental evolution, without distinguishing between these two ways in which the mind is assailed. The way of 'experience' proper is the front door, the door of the five senses. The agents which affect the brain in this way immediately become the mind's objects. The other agents do not. It would be simply silly to say of two men with perhaps equal effective skill in drawing, one an untaught natural genius, the other a mere obstinate plodder in the studio, that both alike owe their skill to their 'experience.' The reasons of their several skills lie in wholly disparate natural cycles of causation.[544]

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

  I am disposed to believe, after interrogating many blind persons, that the use of imaginary maps on a reduced scale is less frequent with them than with the rest of us. Possibly the extraordinary changeableness of the visual magnitudes of things makes this habit natural to us, while the fixity of tactile magnitudes keeps them from falling into it. (When the blind young mall operated on by Dr. Franz was shown a, portrait in a locket, he was vastly surprised that the face could be put into so small a compass: it would have seemed to him, he said, as impossible as to put a bushel into a pint.) Be this as it may, however, the space which each blind man feels to extend beyond his body is felt by him as one smooth continuum—all trace of those muscular startings and stoppings and reversals which presided over its formation having been eliminated from the memory. It seems, in other words, a generic image of the space-element common to all these experiences, with the unessential particularities of each left out. In truth, where in this space a start or a, stop may have occurred was quite accidental. It may never occur just there again, and so the attention lets it drops altogether. Even as long a space as that traversed in a several-mile walk will not necessarily appear to a blind man's thought in the guise of a series of locomotor acts. Only where there is some distinct locomotor difficulty, such as a, step to ascend, a difficult crossing, or a disappearance of the path, will distinct locomotor images constitute the idea. Elsewhere the space seems continuous, and its parts may even all seem coexistent; though, as a very intelligent blind friend once remarked to me, 'To think of such distances involves probably more mental wear and tear and brain-waste in the blind than in the seeing.' This seems to point to a greater element of successive addition and construction in the blind mans idea.

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

  Take again the contractions of the muscles which make the eyeball rotate. The feeling of these is supposed by many writers to play the chief part in our perceptions of extent. The space seen between two things means, according to these authors, nothing but the amount of contraction which is needed to carry the fovea from the first thing to the second. But close the eyes and note the contractions in themselves (even when coupled as they still are with the delicate surface sensations of the eyeball rolling under the lids), and we are surprised standing how vague their space-import appears. Shut the eyes and roll them, and you call with no approach to accuracy tell the outer object which shall first be seen when you open them again.[206] Moreover, if our eye-muscle-contractions had much to do with giving us our sense of seen extent, we ought to have a natural illusion of which we and no trace. Since the feeling in the muscles grows disproportionately intense as the eyeball is rolled into an extreme eccentric position, all places on the extreme margin of the field of view ought to appear farther from the centre than they really are, for the fovea cannot get to them without an amount of this feeling altogether in excess of the amount of actual rotation.[207] When we turn to the muscles of the body at large we find the same vagueness. Goldscheider found that the minimal perceived rotation of size depend on a comparison of a limb about a joint was no less when the movement was 'active' or produced by muscular contraction than when it was 'passively' impressed.[208] The consciousness of active movement became so blunt when the joint (alone!) was made anæsthetic by faradization, that it became evident that the feeling of contraction could never be used for fine discrimination of extents. And that it was not used for coarse discriminations appeared clear to Goldscheider from certain other results which are too circumstantial for me to quote in detail.[209] His general conclusion is that we feel our movements exclusively in our articular surfaces, and that our muscular contractions in all probability hardly occasion this sort of perception at all.[210] My conclusion is that the 'muscular sense' must fall back to the humble position from which Charles Bell raised it, and no longer figure in Psychology as the leading organ in space perception which it has been so long 'cracked up' to be.

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

  [image file=image_524.jpg] The same length of skin, moreover, will convey a more extensive sensation according to the manlier of stimulation. If the edge of a card be pressed against the skis, the distance between its extremities will seem shorter than that between two compass-tips touching the same terminal points.[157] [142] In the eye, intensity of nerve-stimulation seems to increase the volume of the feeling as well as its brilliancy. If we raise and lower the gas alternately, the whole room and all the objects in it seem alternately to enlarge and contract. If we cover half a page of small print with a gray glass, the print seen through the glass appears decidedly smaller than that seen outside of it, and the darker the glass the greater the difference. When a circumscribed opacity in front of the retina, keeps off part of the light from the portion which it covers, objects projected on that portion may seem but half as large as when their image falls outside of it.[158] The inverse effect seems produced by certain drugs and anæsthetics. Morphine, atropine, daturine, and cold blunt the sensibility of the skin, so that distances upon it seem less. Haschish produces strange perversions of the general sensibility. Under its influence one's body may seem either enormously enlarged or strangely contracted. Sometimes a single member will alter its proportion to the rest; or one's back, for instance, will appear entirely absent, as if one mere hollow behind. Objects comparatively near will recede to a vast distance, a short street assume to the eye an immeasurable perspective. Ether and chloroform occasionally produce not wholly dissimilar results. Panum, the German physiologist, relates that when, as a, boy, he was etherized for neuralgia, the objects in the room grew extremely small and distant, before his held of vision dark-hued over and the roaring in his ears began. He also mentions that a friend of his in church, struggling in vain to keep awake, saw the preacher grow smaller and smaller and more and more distant. I myself on one occasion observed the same recession of objects during the beginning of chloroformization. In various cerebral diseases we find analogous disturbances.

• 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)

  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)

  "To my astonishment, I found that, the great majority of the men of science to whom I first applied protested that mental imagery way unknown to them, and they looked on me as fanciful and fantastic in supposing that the words 'mental imagery' really expressed what I believed everybody supposed them to mean. They had no more notion of its true nature than a color-blind man, who has not discerned his defect, has of the nature of color. They had a mental deficiency of which they were unaware, and naturally enough supposed that those who affirmed they possessed it were romancing. To illustrate their mental attitude it will be sufficient to quote a few lines from the letter of one of my correspondents, who writes: "These questions presuppose assent to some sort of a proposition regarding the "mind's eye," and the "images" which it sees. . . . This points to some initial fallacy. . . . It is only by a figure of speech that I can describe my recollection of a scene as a "mental image" which I can "see" with my "mind's eye. " . . . I do not see it . . . any more than a man sees the thousand lines of Sophocles which under due pressure he is ready to repeat. The memory possesses it,' etc. "Much the same result followed inquiries made for me by a friend among members of the French Institute. "On the other hand, when I spoke to persons whom I met in general society, I found an entirely different disposition to prevail. Many men and a yet large number of women, and many boys and girls, declared that they habitually saw mental imagery, and that it way perfectly distinct to them and full of color. The more I pressed and crossed-questioned them, professing myself to be incredulous, the more obvious was the truth of their first assertions. They described their imagery in minute detail, and they spoke in a tone of surprise at my apparent hesitation in accepting what they said. I felt that I myself should have spoken exactly as they did if I had been describing a scene that lay before my eyes, in broad daylight, to a blind man who persisted in doubting the reality of vision. Reassured by this happier experience, I recommenced to inquire among" scientific men, and soon found scattered instances of what I sought, though in by no means the same abundance as elsewhere. I then circulated my questions more generally among my friends and through their hands, and obtained replies . . . from persons of both sexes, and of various ages, and in the end from occasional correspondents in nearly every civilized country.

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

  As Priestley says: "Nothing is requisite to make any man whatever he is, but a sentient principle with this single law. . . . Not only all our intellectual pleasures and pains but all the phenomena of memory, imagination, volition, reasoning and every other mental affection and operation, are but different modes or cases of the association of ideas."[495] An eminent French psychologist, M. Ribot, repeats Hume's comparison of the law of association with that of gravitation, and goes on to say: "It is remarkable that this discovery was made so late. Nothing is simpler, apparently, than to notice that this law of association is the truly fundamental, irreducible phenomenon of our mental life; that it is at the bottom of all our acts; that is permits of no exception; that neither dream, revery, mystic ecstasy, nor the most abstract reasoning can exist without it; that its suppression would be equivalent to that of thought itself. Nevertheless no ancient author understood it, for one cannot seriously maintain that a few scattered lines in Aristotle and the Stoics constitute a theory and clear view of the subject. It is to Hobbes, Hume, and Hartley that we must attribute the origin of these studies on the connection of our ideas. The discovery of the ultimate law of our psychologic acts has this, then, in common with many other discoveries: it came late and seems so simple that it may justly astonish us. "Perhaps it is not superfluous to ask in what this manner of explanation is superior to the current theory of Faculties.[496] The most extended usage consists, as we know, in dividing intellectual phenomena into classes, in separating those which differ, in grouping together those of the same nature and in giving to these a common name and in attributing them to the same cause; it is thus that we have come to distinguish those diverse aspects of intelligence which are called judgment, reasoning, abstraction, perception, etc. This method is precisely the one followed in Physics, where the words caloric, electricity, gravity, designate the unknown causes of certain groups of phenomena. If one thus never forgets that the diverse faculties are only the unknown causes of known phenomena, that they are simply a convenient means of classifying the facts and speaking of them, if one does not fall into the common fault of making out of them substantial entities, creations which now agree, now disagree, so forming in the intelligence a little republic; then, we can see nothing reprehensible in this distribution into faculties, conformable as it is to the rules of a sound method and of a good natural classification. In what then is Mr. Bain's procedure superior to the method of the faculties?

• From Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011)

  events that are normal in a situation, though not sufficiently probable to be actively expected. A single incident may make a recurrence less surprising. Some years ago, my wife and I were vacationing in a small island resort on the Great Barrier Reef. There are only forty guest rooms on the island. When we came to dinner, we were surprised to meet an acquaintance, a psychologist named Jon. We greeted each other warmly and commented on the coincidence. Jon left the resort the next day. About two weeks later, we were in a theater in London. A latecomer sat next to me after the lights went down. When the lights came up for the intermission, I saw that my neighbor was Jon. My wife and I commented later that we were simultaneously conscious of two facts: first, this was a more remarkable coincidence than the first meeting; second, we were distinctly less surprised to meet Jon on the second occasion than we had been on the first. Evidently, the first meeting had somehow changed the idea of Jon in our minds. He was now “the psychologist who shows up when we travel abroad.” We (System 2) knew this was a ludicrous idea, but our System 1 had made it seem almost normal to meet Jon in strange places. We would have experienced much more surprise if we had met any acquaintance other than Jon in the next seat of a London theater. By any measure of probability, meeting Jon in the theater was no more likely than meeting any one of our hundreds of acquaintances—yet meeting Jon seemed more normal. Under some conditions, passive expectations quickly turn active, as we found in another coincidence. On a Sunday evening some years ago, we were driving from New York City to Princeton, as we had been doing every week for a long time. We saw an unusual sight: a car on fire by the side of the road. When we reached the same stretch of road the following Sunday, another car was burning there. Here again, we found that we were distinctly less surprised on the second occasion than we had been on the first. This was now “the place where cars catch fire.” Because the circumstances of the recurrence were the same, the second incident was sufficient to create an active expectation: for months, perhaps for years, after the event we were reminded of burning cars whenever we reached that spot of the road and were quite prepared to see another one (but of course we never did). The psychologist Dale Miller and I wrote an essay in which we attempted to explain how events come to be perceived as normal or abnormal. I will use an example from our description of “norm theory,” although my interpretation of it has changed slightly:

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

  In the first, attention is kept incessantly on the move; before it is accommodated to a, it is disturbed by the suddenness, intensity, and novelty of b; in the second, it is kept all but stationary by the repeated presentation of the same impression. Such excess and defect of surprises make one realize a fact which in ordinary life is so obscure as to escape notice. But recent experiments have set this fact in a more striking light, and made clear what Locke had dimly before his mind in talking of a certain distance between the presentations of a waking man. In estimating very short periods of time of a second or less, indicated, say, by the beats of a metronome, it is found that there is a certain period for which the mean of a number of estimates is correct, while shorter periods are on the whole over-, and longer periods under-estimated. I take this to be evidence of the time occupied in accommodating or fixing attention." Alluding to the fact that a series of experiences, a b c d e, may seem short in retrospect, which seemed everlasting in passing, he says: "What tells in retrospect is the series a b c d e, etc.; what tells in the present is the intervening t 1 t 2 t 3 , etc., or rather the original accommodation of which these temporal signs are the residuum." And he concludes thus: "We seem to have proof that our perception of duration rests ultimately upon quasi-motor objects of varying intensity, the duration of which we do not directly experience as duration at all." Wundt also thinks that the interval of about three-fourths of a second, which is estimated with the minimum of error, points to a connection between the time-feeling and the succession of distinctly 'apperceived' objects before the mind. The 'association-time' is also equal to about three fourths of a second. This association-time he regards as a sort of internal standard of duration to which we involuntarily assimilate all intervals which we try to reproduce, bringing shorter ones up to it and longer ones down. [In the Stevens result we should have to say contrast instead of assimilate, for the longer intervals there seem longer, and the shorter ones shorter still.] "Singularly enough," he adds (Physiol. Psych., II. 286), "this time is about that in which in rapid walking, according to the Webers, our legs perform their swing.

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

  It takes but a moderate effort of observation to ascertain this fact; and from this we may conclude that we have been seeing the far greater part of the external world double all our lives, although numbers of persons are unaware of it, and are in the highest degree astonished when it is brought to their attention. As a matter of fact, we never have seen in this double fashion any particular object upon which our attention was directed at the time; for upon such objects we always converge both eyes. In the habitual use of our eyes, our attention is always withdrawn from such objects as give us double images at the time; this is the reason why we so seldom learn that these images exist. In order to find them we must set our attention a new and unusual task; we must make it explore the lateral parts of the field of vision, not, as usual, to find what objects are there, but to analyze our sensations. Then only do we notice this phenomenon. [428] "The same difficulty which is found in the observation of subjective sensations to which no external object corresponds is found also in the analysis of compound sensations which correspond to a single object. Of this sort are many of our sensations of sound. When the sound of a violin, no matter how often we hear it, excites over and over again in our ear the same sum of partial tones, the result is that our feeling of this sum of tones ends by becoming for our mind a mere sign for the voice of the violin. Another combination of partial tones becomes the sensible sign of the voice of a clarionet, etc. And the oftener any such combination is heard, the more accustomed we grow to perceiving it as an integral total, and the harder it becomes to analyze it by immediate observation. I believe that this is one of the principal reasons why the analysis of the notes of the human voice in singing is relatively so difficult. Such fusions of many sensations into what, to conscious perception, seems a simple whole, abound in all our senses. "Physiological optics affords other interesting examples.

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

  Most persons who have not had their attention expressly called to the existence of these figures are apt to notice them for the first time when some ailment befalls their eyes and attracts their attention to the subjective state of these organs. The usual complaint then is that the muscœ volitantes came in with the malady; and this often makes the patients very anxious about these harmless things, and attentive to all their peculiarities. It is then hard work to make them believe that these figures have existed throughout all their previous life, and that all healthy eyes contain them. I knew an old gentleman who once had occasion to cover one of his eyes which had accidentally become diseased, and who was then in no small degree shocked at finding that his other eye was totally blind; with a sort of blindness, moreover, which must have lasted years, and yet he never was aware of it. "Who, besides, would believe without performing the appropriate experiments, that when one of his eyes is closed there is a great gap, the so-called 'blind spot,' not far from the middle of the field of the open eye, in which he sees nothing at all, but which he fills out with his imagination? Mariotte, who was led by theoretic speculations to discover this phenomenon, awakened no small surprise when he showed it at the court of Charles II. of England. The experiment was at that time repeated with many variations, and became a fashionable amusement. The gap is, in fact, so large that seven full moons alongside of each other would not cover its diameter, and that a man's face 6 or 7 feet off disappears within it. In our ordinary use of vision this great hole in the field fails utterly to be noticed; because our eyes are constantly wandering, and the moment an object interests us we turn them full upon it. So it follows that the object which at any actual moment excites our attention never happens to fall upon this gap, and thus it is that we never grow conscious of the blind spot in the field. In order to notice it, we must first purposely rivet our gaze upon one object and then move about a second object in the neighborhood of the blind spot, striving meanwhile to attend to this latter without moving the direction of our gaze from the first object. This runs counter to all our habits, and is therefore a difficult thing to accomplish. With some people it is even an impossibility. But only when it is accomplished do we see the second object vanish and convince ourselves of the existence of this gap. "Finally, let me refer to the double images of ordinary binocular vision. Whenever we look at a point with both eyes, all objects on this side of it or beyond appear double.