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.
[[ id="n105.1"]]
Phantasie u. Phantasienvorstellung. Zeitschrift f. Philosophie u.
philosophische Kritik. Vol. 95.
[[ id="n105.2"]]
Cf. Witasek: Zeitschrift f. Psychologie. Vol. XII. "Über
Willkürliche
Vorstellungsverbindung."
[[ id="n105.3"]]
Psychologie. Wien u. Prag. 1897.