University of Virginia Library

Section 105. (C) Imaginative Ideas.

Illusions of sense, hallucinations, and illusions proper taken as a group, differ from imaginative representations because the individual who has them is more or less passive and subject to the thing from which they arise, while with the latter the individual is more active and creates new images by the combination of existing or only imagined conditions. It does not matter whether these consist of the idea only, or whether they are the product of word, manuscript, picture, sculpture, music, etc. We have to deal only with their occurrence and their results. Of course there is no sharp boundary between imaginative ideas and sense-perception, etc. Many phenomena are difficult to classify and even language is uncertain in its usage. The notion "illusion" has indicated many a false ideal, many a product of incoherent fancy.

The activity of the imagination, taken in the ordinary sense, requires analysis first of all. According to Meinong[1] there are two kinds of imaginative images—a generative, and a constructive kind. The first exhibits elements, the second unites them. Thus: I imagine some familiar house, then I reproduce the idea of fire (generative), now I unite these two elements, and imagine the house in question in flames (constructive). This involves several conditions.

The conditions of generation offer no difficulties. The difficulty lies in the constructive aspect of the activity, for we can imagine astonishingly little. We can not imagine ourselves in the fourth dimension, and although we have always had to make use of such quantities, we all have the idea that the quantity A represents, e. g,, a line, A2, a square, A3, a cube, but as soon as we have to say what image A5, A6, etc., represents, our mathematical language is at an end. Even twelve men or a green flame seen through red glass or two people speaking different things can barely be imagined with any clearness. We have the elements but we can not construct their compounds. This difficulty occurs also in the consideration of certain objects. Suppose we are looking at an artistically complete angel; we are always bothered by the idea that his wings are much too small to enable him to fly. If an angel constructed like a man is to be borne by his wings, they must be so gigantic as to be unreproducible by an artist. Indeed a person slightly more grubby,

and interested in anatomy, will bother, at the sight of the most beautiful statue of an angel, concerning the construction of the limbs, the wings, and their relation to the skeleton. In certain directions, therefore, the imagination is too weak to conceive an ethereal being in human form floating in the air. Further, one authority points out that we think more frequently of centaurs than of human beings with serpentine bodies, not because centaurs are more æsthetic but because horses are more massive than serpents. I do not believe this to be the true explanation, for otherwise we should have had to imagine people with canine bodies, inasmuch as we see as many dogs as horses, if not more. But the fact is correct and the explanation may be that we imagine a centaur because of the appropriate size, the implied power, and because it is not a wide leap from a horseman to a centaur. In short, here also we see that the imagination prefers to work where difficulties are fewer. Thus, with the ease of imagining an object there goes its definite possibility. I know an old gentleman in A and another one in B who have never seen each other, but I can easily imagine them together, speaking, playing cards, etc., and only with difficulty can I think of them as quarreling or betting. In the possibility there is always a certain ease, and this is appropriated by the imagination.

It is significant that when others help us and we happen to find pleasure therein, we answer to very difficult demands upon the imagination. In the opera the deviation from reality is so powerful that it seems silly to one unaccustomed to it. But we do not need the unaccustomed person. We need only to imagine the most ordinary scene in an opera, i. e., a declaration of love, sung; an aria declining it; an aria before committing suicide; a singing choir with a moral about this misfortune. Has anything even remotely like it ever been seen in real life? But we accept it quietly and find it beautiful and affecting simply because others perform it without difficulty before our eyes and we are willing to believe it possible.

The rule to be derived from all the foregoing is this. Whenever we believe a statement to be based on imagination, or to have been learned from some imaginative source, we must always connect it with its most proximate neighbors, and step by step seek out its elements and then compound them in the simplest possible form. We may, in this fashion, get perhaps at the proper content of the matter. Of course it need not yield another imaginary image. And its failure to do so would be an objection if the compound were the end of the work and were to be used in itself. But that is not the

case. All that is required is to derive a certain starting-point from the hodge-podge of uncertainties and unintelligibility. When the construction is made it must be compared with all the material at hand and tested by that material. If the two agree, and only when they agree, may it be assumed that the starting-point has been properly chosen. But not to make this construction means to feel around aimlessly, and to give up the job before it has been really begun.

Let us take the simplest possible instance of such a situation. In a bowling alley, two youths, A and B, had a lively quarrel, in which A held the ball in his hand and threatened to throw it at B's head. B, frightened, ran away, A pursued him, after a few steps threw the ball into the grass, caught B, and then gave him an easy blow with the fiat of his hand on the back of his head. B began to wabble, sank to the ground, became unconscious, and showed all the signs of a broken head (unconsciousness, vomiting, distention of the pupils, etc.). All the particular details of the event are unanimously testified to by many witnesses, non-partisan friends of A and B, and among them the parish priest. Simulation is completely excluded inasmuch as B, a simple peasant lad, certainly did not know the symptoms of brain-fever, and could not hope for any damages from the absolutely poor A. Let us now consider what the nearest facts are. The elements of the case are: B sees a heavy ball in A's hand; A threatens B with it and pursues him; B feels a blow on the head. The compounding of these elements results in the invincible assumption on B's part that A had struck him on the head with the ball. The consequence of this imaginative feeling was the development of all the phenomena that would naturally have followed if B had actually been struck on the head.

It would be wrong to say that these cases are so rare as to be useless in practice. We simply do not observe them for the reason that we take much to be real because it is confirmed reliably. More accurate examination would show that many things are merely imaginative. A large portion of the contradictions we meet in our cases is explicable by the fact that one man is the victim of his fancies and the other is not. The great number of such fancies is evinced by the circumstance that there can nowhere be found a chasm or boundary between the simplest fancies of the normal individual and the impossible imaginings of the lunatic. Every man imagines frequently the appearance of an absent friend, of a landscape he has once seen. The painter draws even the features of an absent

model; the practiced chess-master plays games without having the board before him; persons half asleep see the arrival of absentees; persons lost in the wood at night see spirits and ghosts; very nervous people see them at home, and the lunatic sees the most extraordinary and disgusting things—all these are imaginations beginning with the events of the daily life, ending with the visions of diseased humanity. Where is the boundary, where a lacuna?

Here, as in all events of the daily life, the natural development of the extremely abnormal from the ordinary is the incontrovertible evidence for the frequency of these events.

Of course one must not judge by one's self. Whoever does not believe in the devil, and never as a child had an idea of him in mind, will never see him as an illusion. And whoever from the beginning possesses a restricted, inaccessible imagination, can never understand the other fellow who is accompanied by the creatures of his imagination. We observe this hundreds of times. We know that everybody sees a different thing in clouds, smoke, mountain tops, ink blots, coffee stains, etc.; that everybody sees it according to the character and intensity of his imagination, and that whatever seems to be confused and unintelligible is to be explained as determined by the nature of the person who expresses or possesses it.

So in the study of any work of art. Each is the portrayal of some generality in concrete form. The concrete is understood by anybody who knows enough to recognize it. The generality can be discovered only by him who has a similar imagination, and hence each one draws a different generalization from the same work of art. This variety holds also in scientific questions. I remember how three scholars were trying to decipher hieroglyphs, when that branch of archæology was still very young. One read the inscription as a declaration of war by a nomadic tribe, another as the acquisition of a royal bride from a foreign king; and the third as an account of the onions consumed by Jews contributing forced labor. "Scientific" views could hardly of themselves have made such extraordinary differences; only imagination could have driven scholars in such diverse directions.

And how little we can apprehend the imaginations of others or judge them! This is shown by the fact that we can no longer tell whether children who vivify everything in their imagination see their fancies as really alive. It is indubitable that the savage who takes his fetish to be alive, the child that endows its doll with life, would wonder if fetish and doll of themselves showed signs of

vitality—but whether they really take them to be alive is unknown to the adult. And if we can not sympathetically apprehend the views and imaginings of our own youth, how much less possible is it so to apprehend those of other people. We have to add to this fact, moreover, the characteristic circumstance that less powerful effects must be taken into consideration. The power of imagination is much more stimulated by mild, peaceful impressions than by vigorous ones. The latter stun and disquiet the soul, while the former lead it to self-possession. The play of ideas is much more excited by mild tobacco smoke, than by the fiery column of smoking Vesuvius; the murmur of the brook is much more stimulating than the roar of the stormy sea. If the converse were true it would be far easier to observe the effects in others. We see that a great impression is at work, our attention is called to its presence, and we are then easily in the position of observing its effect in others. But the small, insignificant phenomena we observe the less, the less obvious their influence upon the imagination of others appears to be. Such small impressions pass hundreds of times without effect. For once, however, they find a congenial soul, their proper soil, and they begin to ferment. But how and when are we to observe this in others?

We rarely can tell whether a man's imagination is at work or not. Nevertheless, there are innumerable stories of what famous men did when their imagination was at work. Napoleon had to cut things to pieces. Lenau used to scrape holes in the ground. Mozart used to knot and tear table-cloth and napkins. Others used to run around; still others used to smoke, drink, whistle, etc. But not all people have these characteristics, and then we who are to judge the influence of the imagination on a witness or a criminal are certainly not present when the imagination is at work. To get some notion of the matter through witnesses is altogether too unsafe a task. Bain once justly proposed keeping the extremities quiet as a means of conquering anger. Thus it may be definitely discovered whether a man was quite angry at a given instant by finding out whether his hands and feet were quiet at the time, but such indices are not given for the activity of imagination.

Moreover, most people in whom the imagination is quite vigorously at work know nothing about it. Du Bois-Reymond says somewhere, "I've had a few good ideas in my life, and have observed myself when I had them. They came altogether involuntarily, without my ever having thought of them." This I do not believe. His imagination, which was so creative, worked so easily and without

effort that he was not aware of its activity, and moreover, his fundamental ideas were so clear that everything fell into lines spontaneously without his being conscious of it later. This "working" of the imagination is so effortless to fortunate natures that it becomes an ordinary movement. Thus Goethe tells of an imaginary flower which broke into its elements, united again, broke again, and united in another form, etc. His story reveals one of the reasons for the false descriptions of perception. The perception is correct when made, then the imagination causes movements of ideas and the question follows which of the two was more vigorous, the perceptive or the imaginal activity? If the one was intenser, memory was correct; if the other, the recollection was erroneous. It is hence important, from the point of view of the lawyer, to study the nature and intensity of witnesses' imagination.[2] We need only to observe the influence of imaginal movements on powerful minds in order to see clearly what influence even their weak reflection may have on ordinary people. Schopenhauer finds the chief pleasure of every work of art in imagination; and Goethe finds that no man experiences or enjoys anything without becoming productive.

Most instructive is the compilation of imaginative ideas given by Höfler[3] and put together from the experiences of scholars, investigators, artists, and other important persons. For our purposes it would be better to have a number of reliable statements from other people which would show how normal individuals were led astray by their imaginations. We might then learn approximately what imaginative notions might do, and how far their limits extend. Sully calls attention to the fact that Dickens's characters were real to him and that when the novel was completed, its dramatic personæ became personal memories. Perhaps all imaginative people are likely to take their imaginings as actual remembered events and persons. If this happens to a witness, what trouble he may cause us!

A physician, Dr. Hadekamp, said that he used to see the flow of blood before he cut the vein open. Another physician, Dr. Schmeisser, confirms this experience. Such cases are controlled physically, the flow of blood can not be seen before the knife is removed. Yet how often, at least chronologically, do similar mistakes occur when no such control is present? There is the story of a woman who could describe so accurately symptoms which resulted from a swallowed needle, that the physicians were deceived and undertook

operations which only served to show that the woman had merely imagined it all. A similar case is that of a man who believed himself to have swallowed his false teeth. He even had serious feelings of choking which immediately disappeared on the discovery of the teeth under his night-table. A prominent oculist told me that he had once treated for some time a famous scholar because the latter so accurately described a weakening of the retina that the physician, in spite of his objective discoveries, was deceived and learned his mistake only when it appeared that the great scholar fortunately had been made game of by his own imagination. Maudsley tells how Baron von Swieten once saw burst a rotten corpse of a dog, and, for years after, saw the same thing whenever he came to the same place. Many people, Goethe, Newton, Shelley, William Black, and others, were able completely to visualize past images. Fechner tells of a man who claimed voluntarily to excite anywhere on his skin the feeling of pressure, heat, and cold, but not of cut, prick or bruise, because such imaginations tended to endure a long time. There is the story of another man who had a three days' pain in his finger because he had seen his child crush an analogous finger.

Abercrombie tells of an otherwise very excitable person who believed in the reality of the luck that a fortune-teller had predicted for him, and some authorities hold that practically everybody who eagerly awaits a friend hears his step in every sound. Hoppe's observation that pruritus vulvæ excites in imaginative women the illusion of being raped is of considerable importance, and we criminalists must watch for it in certain cases. Lieber tells of a colored preacher who so vividly painted the tortures in hell that he himself could merely cry and grunt for minutes at a time. Müller cites a lady who was permitted to smell from an empty bottle and who regularly lost consciousness when she was told that the bottle contained laughing gas. Women often assert that when about to change their homes they often see the new residence in dreams just as it really appears later on. Then there is a story of a man blind for fourteen years who nevertheless saw the faces of acquaintances and was so troubled thereby that the famous Graefe severed his optic nerve and so released him from his imagination.

Taine describes the splendid scene in which Balzac once told Mad. de Girardin that he intended to give Sandeau a horse. He did not do so, but talked so much about it that he used to ask Sandeau how the horse was. Taine comments that it is clear that the starting point of such an illusion is a voluntary fiction. The person

in question knows it as such in the beginning but forgets it at the end. Such false memories are numerous among barbarous peoples and among raw, untrained, and childish minds. They see a simple fact; the more they think of it the more they see in it; they magnify and decorate it with environing circumstances, and finally, unite all the details into a whole in memory. Then they are unable to distinguish what is true from what is not. Most legends develop in this way. A peasant assured Taine that he saw his sister's soul on the day she died,—though it was really the light of a brandy bottle in the sunset.

In conclusion, I want to cite a case I have already mentioned, which seems to me significant. As student I visited during vacation a village, one of whose young peasant inhabitants had gone to town for the first time in his life. He was my vacation play-mate from earliest childhood, and known to me as absolutely devoted to the truth. When he returned from his visit, he told me of the wonders of the city, the climax of which was the menagerie he had visited. He described what he saw very well, but also said that he had seen a battle between an anaconda and a lion. The serpent swallowed the lion and then many Moors came and killed the serpent. As was immediately to be inferred and as I verified on my return, this battle was to be seen only on the advertising posters which are hung in front of every menagerie. The lad's imagination had been so excited by what he had seen that day that the real and the imagined were thoroughly interfused. How often may this happen to our witnesses!

If the notion of imagination is to be limited to the activity of representation, we must class under it the premonitions and forewarnings which are of influence not only among the uneducated. Inasmuch as reliable observations, not put together a posteriori, are lacking, nothing exact can be said about them. That innumerable assertions and a semi-scientific literature about the matter exists, is generally familiar. And it is undeniable that predictions, premonitions, etc., may be very vivid, and have considerable somatic influence. Thus, prophecy of approaching death, certain threats or knowledge of the fact that an individual's death is being prayed for, etc., may have deadly effect on excited people. The latter superstition especially, has considerable influence. Praying for death, etc., is aboriginal. It has been traced historically into the twelfth century and is made use of today. Twelve years ago I was told of a case in which an old lady was killed because an enemy of hers had the

death-mass read for her. The old lady simply died of fright. In some degree we must pay attention to even such apparently remote questions.