A Curious Case of Self-Deception.

Te Aroha News, Volume VII, Issue 404, 21 September 1889, Page 3

A Curious Case of SelfDeception.

Ix his article in the * Nineteenth Century ' on 'The First Night Judgment of Plays,' Mr H. A. Jones incidentally mentions a curious instance pf self-delusion amongst) ' a class of persons who may be supposed to be considerably abore the average in educat'on, intelligence, scientific knowledge,, and general balance of mental power.' He s iys :— ' A minor philosopher who recently crossed the Atlantic, tired of watching the everlasting stretch of waters, to relieve his weariness dropped a plummet into that other and vaster ocean — boundless, unfathomable, innavigable -the ocean of human credulity and fatuity. At, the hour before dinner when it is customary for passengers to take their constitutional on deck, ho sauntered up to one of the air-funnels on the Etruria, and, putting hi* arm down, it, he kept it there for some ninety seconds', andchen, withdrawing it with an expression of pain, he asked the guileless ' passers-by how it was that by putting one's arm.down that particular funnel one received, after .a minute or ho, a severe electric shock at the elbow. With the>help of a confederate, a genial master of hounds, who .kindly acked as " bonnet," about a hundred passengers were induced to try'the'experiment. Wifeh f this curious result. Somte forty of thorn received slight elecuric shocks, some ten or" a, dozen received violent vshocks, and four or five of them entered into elaborate scientific, but mutually destructive explanations of ari occurrence that had never taken |plac©,' ""<•