There is little doubt that ventriloquism has played a conspicuous part in the arts of divination and magic.
_Misconception of Local Arrangement._ Let us now pass to a class of illusions closely related to those having to do with distance, but involving some special kind of circumstance which powerfully suggests a particular arrangement in space.

One of the most striking examples of these is the erroneous localization of a quality in space, that is to say, the reference of it to an object nearer, or further off than the right one.

Thus, when we look through a piece of yellow glass at a dull, wintry landscape, we are disposed to imagine that we are looking at a sunny scene of preternatural warmth.

A moment's reflection would tell us that the yellow tint, with which the objects appear to be suffused, comes from the presence of the glass; yet, in spite of this, the illusion persists with a curious force.

The explanation is, of course, that the circumstances are exceptional, that in a vast majority of cases the impression of colour belongs to the object and not to an intervening medium,[42] and that consequently we tend to ignore the glass, and to refer the colour to the objects themselves.
When, however, the fact of the existence of a coloured medium is distinctly present to the mind, we easily learn to allow for this, and to recognize one coloured surface correctly through a recognized medium.
Thus, we appear to ourselves to see the reflected images of the wall, etc., of a room, in a bright mahogany table, not suffused with a reddish yellow tint, as they actually are--and may be seen to be by the simple device of looking at a small bit of the image through a tube, but in their ordinary colour.