[Illusions by James Sully]@TWC D-Link bookIllusions CHAPTER III 14/37
Thus, when travelling in Italy, the visual impression answering to a ruined temple or a bareheaded friar is construed much more rapidly than it would be elsewhere, because of the attitude of mind due to the surrounding circumstances.
In all such cases the process of preperception connected with a given impression is effected more or less completely by the suggestions of other and related impressions. It follows from all that has been just said that our minds are never in exactly the same state of readiness with respect to a particular process of perceptional interpretation.
Sometimes the meaning of an impression flashes on us at once, and the stage of preperception becomes evanescent.
At other times the same impression will fail for an appreciable interval to divulge its meaning.
These differences are, no doubt, due in part to variations in the state of attention at the moment; but they depend as well on fluctuations in the degree of the mind's readiness to look at the impression in the required way. In order to complete this slight analysis of perception, we must look for a moment at its physical side, that is to say, at the nervous actions which are known or supposed with some degree of probability to accompany it. The production of the sensation is known to depend on a certain external process, namely, the action of some stimulus, as light, on the sense-organ, which stimulus has its point of departure in the object, such as it is conceived by physical science.
<<Back Index Next>> D-Link book Top TWC mobile books
|