Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 12.djvu/541

 528 w. JAMES : we have looked upwards at their bottom hence we see the solids easiest as if from above. Habit or probability seems also to govern the illusion of the intaglio profile, and of the hollow mask. We have never seen a human face except in relief hence the ease with which the present sensation is overpowered. Hence, too, the obstinacy with which human faces and forms, and other extremely familiar convex objects, refuse to appear hollow when viewed through Wheatstone's pseudoscope. Our per- ception seems wedded to certain total ways of seeing certain objects. The moment the object is suggested at all, it takes possession of the mind in the fullness of its stereotyped habitual form. This explains the suddenness of the trans- formations when the perceptions change. The object shoots back and forth completely from this to that familiar thing, and doubtful, indeterminate and composite things are ex- cluded, apparently because we are unused to their existence. When we turn from the diagrams to the actual folded visiting-card and to the real glass, the imagined form seems fully as real as the correct one. The card flaps over ; the glass rim tilts this way or that, as if some inward spring suddenly became released in our eye. In these changes the actual retinal image receives different complements from the mind. But the remarkable thing is that the complement and the image combine so completely that the twain are one flesh, as it were, and cannot be discriminated in the result. If the complement be, as we have called it (on p. 348), a set of imaginary absent eye-sensations, they seem no whit less vividly there than the sensation the eye now receives from without. The case of the after-images distorted by projection upon an oblique plane is even more strange, for the imagined perspective figure, lying in the plane, seems less to combine with the one a moment previously seen by the eye, than to suppress it and take its place. 1 The point needing explana- tion, then, in all this is how it comes to pass that, when imagined sensations are usually so inferior in vivacity to real ones, they should in these few experiences prove to be almost or quite their match. 1 I ought to say that I seem always able to see the cross rectangular at will. But this appears to come from an imperfect absorption of the rectangular after-image by the inclined plane at which the eyes look. The cross, with me, is apt to detach itself from this and then look square. I get the illusion better from the circle, whose after-image becomes in various ways elliptical on being projected upon the different surfaces of the room, and cannot then be easily made to look circular again.