Touch
Russell touches upon a common type of literary image describing tactile sensations as a means of forwarding his philosophical theories about perception and reality. He asserts that those objects “which we see become associated, by habit, with certain tactile sensations which we expect if we touch them; one of the horrors of a ghost (in many ghost-stories) is that it fails to give us any sensations of touch.” This becomes a particularly fascinating use of imager to be used in connection with the subject of how we determine reality. The underlying idea is that sense memory is inextricably linked to perception to the degree that one might question whether a hamburger is real if it does not taste previous hamburgers one has eaten. This makes perfect sense for things like food, of course, but this particular example is complicated by the fact nobody has ever had any actual sensory experience with a ghost by which to use sense memory as a perceptual keystone and our so our ideas of the “reality” of ghosts is exclusively informed by fictional representations.
The Assumption of Truth
The very first example of the use of imagery in this work has the author literally describing the environment in which he is writing the words we are reading. After explaining that this environment includes a chair, a table, and paper, he goes on to describe turning his head looking at the sky through an open window where the image of the sun inspires him to “believe that the sun is about ninety-three million miles from the earth; that it is a hot globe many times bigger than the earth; that, owing to the earth's rotation, it rises every morning, and will continue to do so for an indefinite time in the future.” The key point in this imagery is that he prefaces this information with the perceptual limiter that he believes this information to be true. The philosophical point is these beliefs about the sun and earth are referred to as facts, but we can only take this information as being factually true on the belief in the veracity of the experts making the calculations. From this example, we can extrapolate that there is much information we accept to be factually true without actually knowing for sure. This extrapolation has far-reaching philosophical consequences on the nature of truth and reality.
Julius Caesar
Russell exploits the singular fame of Roman emperor Julius Caesar as imagery to reveal how perception of the truth is often based on learned assumptions when he writes how when “we make a statement about Julius Caesar, it is plain that Julius Caesar himself is not before our minds, since we are not acquainted with him. We have in mind some description of Julius Caesar: 'the man who was assassinated on the Ides of March', 'the founder of the Roman Empire'” or even just simply referencing his name. This imagery directly taps into those historical highlights one has learned about Caesar to illustrate how often one must depend upon acquired knowledge of something not personally experienced in order to make judgments. The implication being that all judgements not based on personal experience are inherently unstable.
Gradations of Perception
In analyzing the concept that the empirical truth of the reality of an external object is subject to gradations of perception, Russell again turns to imagery to concrete illustrate an abstract theory. “Take, for example, the case of a horse trotting away from us along a hard road. At first our certainty that we hear the hoofs is complete; gradually, if we listen intently, there comes a moment when we think perhaps it was imagination or the blind upstairs or our own heartbeats; at last we become doubtful whether there was any noise at all.” The understanding of this imagery successfully conveys the abstraction theoretical principle of how gradations in sensory perception become fundamental to our ability to determine reality because of its immediate tangibility. Most people can at least visualize this imagery even if they themselves have never experienced it and this visualization can then extrapolated to take the shape of a personal experience that is fundamentally identical.
