THE PERCEPTION OF THINGS. 97 



Hebrew in a gj'mnasium ; and when he called the other to help correct 

 his pupils' exercises, it turned out that he could find out all sorts of 

 little errors better than his friend, because the latter's perception of the 

 words as totals was too swift." * 



Testimony to personal identity is proverbially faUacious for 

 similar reasons. A man has witnessed a rapid crime or 

 accident, and carries away his mental image. Later he is 

 confronted by a prisoner whom he forthwith perceives in 

 the light of that image, and recognizes or ' identifies ' as a 

 participant, although he may never have been near the 

 spot. Similarly at the so-called ' materializing seances ' 

 which fraudulent mediums give : in a dark room a man 

 sees a gauze-robed figure who in a whisper tells him she is 

 the spirit of his sister, mother, wife, or child, and falls upon 

 his neck. The darkness, the previous forms, and the ex- 

 pectancy have so filled his mind with piemonitory images 

 that it is no wonder he perceives what is suggested. These 

 fraudulent ' seances ' would furnish most precious docu- 

 ments to the psychology of perception, if they could only 

 be satisfactorily inquired into. In the hypnotic trance any 

 suggested object is sensibly perceived. In certain subjects 

 this happens more or less completely after waking from 

 the trance. It would seem that under favorable conditions 

 a somewhat similar susceptibility to suggestion may exist 

 in certain persons who are not otherwise entranced at all. 



This suggestibility is greater in the lower senses than 

 in the higher. A German observer writes : 



" We know that a weak smell or taste may be very diversely inter- 

 preted by us, and that the same sensation will now be named as one 

 thing and the next moment as another. Suppose an agreeable smell of 

 flowers in a room : A visitor will notice it, seek to recognize what it is, 



*M. Lazarus: Das Leben d. Seele, ii (1857), p. 32. In the ordinary 

 hearing of speech half the words wi' seem to hear are supplied out of our 

 own head. A language with which we are perfectly familiar is imder- 

 stood, even when spoken in low tones and far off. An unfamiliar language 

 is unintelligible under these conditions. If we do not get a very good seat 

 at a foreign theatre, we fail to follow the dialogue ; and what gives trouble 

 to most of us when abroad is not only that the natives speak so fast, but 

 that they speak so indistinctly and so low. The verbal objects for inter- 

 preting the sounds by are not alert and ready made in our minds, as they 

 are in our familiar mother-tongue, and do not start up at so faint a cue. 



