"A hallucination is a fact, not an error; what is erroneous is a judgment based upon it." (Bertrand Russell, "On the Nature of Acquaintance: Neutral Monism", 1914)
"Science cannot enter into the dark territory beyond the scope of man's faculties, and where verification, direct or indirect, is not possible. A vivid imagination can people this region with phantasms and be deluded with the hallucination that these creatures of the imagination are real, substantial, objective facts." (Joseph W Mellor," A Comprehensive Treatise on Inorganic and Theoretical Chemistry", 1922)
"The proximate goal of all perception is what we can get our hands upon. If we traverse the distance that separate us from that which we see or hear and find nothing for the hand to manipulate, the experience is an illusion or a hallucination. The world of perceptual reality, the world of physical things, is the world of our contacts and our manipulations, and the distance experience of the eye and the ear means first of all these physical things. Physical things are not only the meaning of what we see and hear; they are also the means we employ to accomplish our ends." (George H Mead, "The Nature of Aesthetic Experience." International Journal of Ethics", Vol. 36 (4), 1926)
"Our mania for rational explanations obviously has its roots in our fear of metaphysics, for the two were always hostile brothers. Hence, anything unexpected that approaches us from the dark realm is regarded either as coming from outside and, therefore, as real, or else as a hallucination and, therefore, not true. The idea that anything could be real or true which does not come from outside has hardly begun to dawn on contemporary man." (Carl Jung," Wotan", Neue Schweizer Rundschau, 1936)
"There is no theory we may hold and no observation we can make that will retain so much as its old defective reference to the facts if the net be altered. Tinitus, paraestheaias, hallucinations, delusions, confusions and disorientations intervene. Thus empiry confirms that if our nets are undefined, our facts are undefined, and to the 'real' we can attribute not so much as one quality or 'form'. With determi-nation of the net, the unknowable object of knowledge, the 'thing in itself', ceases to be unknowable." (Norbert Wiener, "Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine", 1948)
"Madness designates the equinox between the vanity of night's hallucinations and the non-being of light's judgments." (Michel Foucault, "Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason", 1961)
"There is a curious law of art [...] that even the attempt to reproduce the act of seeing, when carried out with sufficient energy, tends to lose its realism and take on the unnatural glittering intensity of hallucination." (Northrop Frye, [in "Design as a Principle in the Arts, The Critical Path and Other Writings on Critical Theory, 1963–1975"] 1966)
"We suffer from a hallucination, from a false and distorted sensation of our own existence as living organisms. Most of us have the sensation that 'I myself' is a seperate center of feeling and action, living inside and bounded by the physical body-a center which 'confronts' an 'external' world of people and things, making contact through the senses with a universe both alien and strange." (Alan Watts, "On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are", 1966)
"Inability to accept the mystic experience is more than an intellectual handicap. Lack of awareness of the basic unity of organism and environment is a serious and dangerous hallucination. For in a civilization equipped with immense technological power, the sense of alienation between man and nature leads to the use of technology in a hostile spirit - to the conquest of nature instead of intelligent co-operation with nature." (Alan Watts," Psychedelics and Religious Experience", California Law Review Vol. 56 (1) 1968)
"To one completely committed to this realm of becoming, as are the empiricists, the claim to apprehend verities is a sign of psychopathology. Probably we have here but a highly sophisticated expression of the doctrine that ideals are hallucination and that the only normal, sane person is the healthy extrovert, making instant, instinctive adjustments to the stimuli of the material world." (Richard Weaver, "Language is Sermonic" 1970)
"Any attempt to dismiss a phenomenon that is not understood merely by explaining it as hallucination becomes irrelevant when a coherent scientific theory can be applied." (Amit Goswami et al, "The Self-Aware Universe: How Consciousness Creates the Material World" 1993)
"Even death is unreliable: instead of zero it may be some ghastly hallucination, such as the square root of minus one." (Samuel Beckett [attributed])
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