Carl%20Sagan%20-%20The%20Demon%20Haunted%20World

8
On the Distinction between
True and False Visions
A credulous mind . . . finds most delight in believing
strange things, and the stranger they are the easier they pass
with him; but never regards those that are plain and
feasible, for every man can believe such.
Samuel Butler, Characters (1667-9)
For just an instant in the darkened room I sense an apparition -
could it be a ghost? Or there's a flicker of motion; I see it out
of the corner of my eye, but when I turn my head there's nothing
there. Is that a telephone ringing, or is it just my 'imagination'? In
astonishment, I seem to be smelling the salt air of the Coney
Island summer seashore of my childhood. I turn a corner in the
foreign city I'm visiting for the first time, and before me is a street
so familiar I feel I've known it all my life.
In these commonplace experiences, we're generally unsure
what to do next. Were my eyes (or ears, or nose, or memory)
playing 'tricks' on me? Or did I really and truly witness something
out of the ordinary course of Nature? Shall I keep quiet about it,
or shall I tell?
The answer depends very much on my environment, friends,
loved ones and culture. In an obsessively rigid, practically oriented
society, perhaps I would be cautious about admitting to
such experiences. They might mark me as flighty, unsound,
unreliable. But in a society that readily believes in ghosts, say, or
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