Not only so, from a strictly scientific point of view it might seem possible to prove that common cognition, as defined above, must in general be true cognition. I refer here to the now familiar method of the evolutionist.
According to this doctrine, which is a scientific method in so far as it investigates the historical developments of mind or the order of mental phenomena in time, cognition may be viewed as a part of the result of the interaction of external agencies and the organism, as an incident of the great process of adaptation, physical and psychical, of organism to environment. In thus looking at cognition, the evolutionist is making the a.s.sumption which all science makes, namely, that correct views are correspondences between internal (mental) relations and external (physical) relations, incorrect views disagreements between these relations. From this point of view he may proceed to argue that the intellectual processes must tend to conform to external facts. All correspondence, he tells us, means fitness to external conditions and practical efficiency, all want of correspondence practical incompetence.
Consequently, those individuals in whom the correspondence was more complete and exact would have an advantage in the struggle for existence and so tend to be preserved. In this way the process of natural selection, by separately adjusting individual representations to actualities, would make them converge towards a common meeting-point or social standard of true cognition. That is to say, by eliminating or at least greatly circ.u.mscribing the region of individual illusion, natural selection would exclude the possibility of a persistent common illusion.
Not only so, the evolutionist may say that this coincidence between common beliefs and true beliefs would be furthered by social as well as individual compet.i.tion. A community has an advantage in the struggle with other communities when it is distinguished by the presence of the conditions of effective co-operation, such as mutual confidence. Among these conditions a body of true knowledge seems to be of the first importance, since conjoint action always presupposes common beliefs, and, to be effective action, implies that these beliefs are correct.
Consequently, it may be argued, the forces at work in the action of man on man, of society on the individual, in the way of a.s.similating belief, must tend, in the long run, to bring about a coincidence between representations and facts. Thus, in another way, natural selection would help to adjust our ideas to realities, and to exclude the possibility of anything like a permanent common error.
Yet once more, according to Mr. Herbert Spencer, the tendency to agreement between our ideas and the environment would be aided by what he calls the direct process of adaptation. The exercise of a function tends to the development of that function. Thus, our acts of perception must become more exact by mere repet.i.tion. So, too, the representations and concepts growing out of perceptions must tend to approximate to external facts by the direct action of the environment on our physical and psychical organism; for external relations which are permanent will, in the long run, stamp themselves on our nervous and mental structure more deeply and indelibly than relations which are variable and accidental.
It would seem, from all this, that so long as we are keeping to the scientific point of view, that is to say, taking for granted that there is something objectively real answering to our perceptions and conceptions, the question of the possibility of a universal or (permanently) common illusion does not arise. Yet a little more reflection will show us that it may arise in a way. So far as the logical sufficiency of the social consensus or common belief is accepted as scientifically proved, it is open to suspicion on strictly scientific grounds. The evolutionist"s proof involves one or two a.s.sumptions which are not exactly true.
In the first place, it is not strictly correct to say that all illusion involves a practical unfitness to circ.u.mstances. At the close of our investigation of particular groups of illusion, for example, those of perception and memory, it was pointed out that many of the errors reviewed were practically harmless, being either momentary and evanescent, or of such a character as not to lead to injurious action.
And now, by glancing back over the field of illusion as a whole, we may see the same thing. The day-dreams in which some people are apt to indulge respecting the remote future have little effect on their conduct. So, too, a man"s general view of the world is often unrelated to his daily habits of life. It seems to matter exceedingly little, in general, whether a person take up the geocentric or the heliocentric conception of the cosmic structure, or even whether he adopt an optimistic or pessimistic view of life and its capabilities.
So inadequate, indeed, does the agency of natural selection seem to be to eliminate illusion, that it may even be asked whether its tendency may not be sometimes to harden and fix rather than to dissolve and dissipate illusory ideas and beliefs. It will at once occur to the reader that the illusion of self-esteem, discussed in the last chapter, may have been highly useful as subserving individual self-preservation.
In a similar way, it has been suggested by Schopenhauer that the illusion of the lover owes its force and historical persistence to its paramount utility for the preservation of the species. And to pa.s.s from a recurring individual to a permanently common belief, it is maintained by the same pessimist and his followers that what they regard as the illusion of optimism, namely, the idea that human life as a whole is good, grows out of the individual"s irrational love of life, which is only the same instinctive impulse of self-preservation appearing as conscious desire. Once more, it has been suggested that the belief in free-will, even if illusory, would be preserved by the process of evolution, owing to its paramount utility in certain stages of moral development. All this seems to show at least the possibility of a kind of illusion which would tend to perpetuate itself, and to appear as a permanent common belief.
Now, so far as this is the case, so far as illusion is useful or only harmless, natural selection cannot, it is plain, be counted on to weed it out, keeping it within the narrow limits of the exceptional and individual. Natural selection gets rid of what is harmful only, and is indifferent to what is practically harmless.
It may, however, still be said that the process of direct adaptation must tend to establish such a consensus of true belief. Now, I do not wish for a moment to dispute that the growth of intelligence by the continual exercise of its functions tends to such a consensus: this is a.s.sumed to be the case by everybody. What I want to point out is that there is no scientific proof of this position.
The correspondence of internal to external relations is obviously limited by the modes of action of the environment on the organism, consequently by the structure of the organism itself. Scientific men are familiar with the idea that there may be forces in the environment which are practically inoperative on the organism, there being no corresponding mode of sensibility. And even if it be said that our present knowledge of the material world, including the doctrine of the conservation of energy, enables us to a.s.sert that there is no mode of force wholly unknown to us, it can still be contended that the environment may, for aught we know, be vastly more than the forces of which, owing to the nature of our organism, we know it to be composed.
In short, since, on the evolution theory viewed as a scientific doctrine, the real external world does not directly mirror itself in our minds, but only indirectly brings our perceptions and representations into adjustment by bringing into adjustment the nervous organism with which they are somehow connected, it is plain that we cannot be certain of adequately apprehending the external reality which is here a.s.sumed to exist.
Science, then, cannot prove, but must a.s.sume the coincidence between permanent common intuitions and objective reality. To raise the question whether this coincidence is perfect or imperfect, whether all common intuitions known to be persistent are true or whether there are any that are illusory, is to pa.s.s beyond the scientific point of view to another, namely, the philosophic. Thus, our study of illusion naturally carries us on from scientific to philosophic reflection. Let me try to make this still more clear.
_Transition to Philosophic View._
All science makes certain a.s.sumptions which it never examines. Thus, the physicist a.s.sumes that when we experience a sensation we are acted on by some pre-existing external object which is the cause, or at least one condition, of the sensation. While resolving the secondary qualities of light, sound, etc., into modes of motion, while representing the object very differently from the unscientific mind, he agrees with this in holding to the reality of something external, regarding this as antecedent to and therefore as independent of the particular mind which receives the sense-impression. Again, he a.s.sumes the uniformity of nature, the universality of the causal relation, and so on.
Similarly, the modern psychologist, when confining himself within the limits of positive science, and treating mind phenomenally or empirically, or, in other words, tracing the order of mental states in time and a.s.signing their conditions, takes for granted much the same as physical science does. Thus, as our foregoing a.n.a.lysis of perception shows, he a.s.sumes that there is an external cause of our sensations, that there are material bodies in s.p.a.ce, which act on our sense-organs and so serve as the condition of our sense-impressions. More than this, he regards, in the way that has been ill.u.s.trated in this work, the percept itself, in so far as it is a process in time, as the normal result of the action of such external agents on our nerve-structures, in other words, as the effect of such action in the case of the healthy and perfect nervous organism with the average organized dispositions, physical and psychical; in which case he supposes the percept to correspond, in certain respects at least, with the external cause as made known by physical science. And, on the other hand, he looks on a false or illusory percept as arising in another way not involving, as its condition, the pre-existence of a corresponding material body or physical agent. And in this view of perception, as of other mental phenomena, the psychologist clearly takes for granted the principle that all mental events conform to the law of causation. Further, he a.s.sumes that the individual mind is somehow, in a way which it is not his province to inquire into, one and the same throughout, and so on.
The doctrine of evolution, too, in so far as scientific--that is, aiming at giving an account of the historical and pre-historical developments of the collective mind in time--agrees with psychology in making like a.s.sumptions. Thus, it conceives an external agency (the environment) as the cause of our common sensations and perceptions. That is to say, it represents the external world as somehow antecedent to, and so apparently independent of, the perceptions which are adjusted to it. And all this shows that science, while removed from vulgar unenlightened opinion, takes sides with popular thought in a.s.suming the truth of certain fundamental ideas or so-called intuitive beliefs, into the exact meaning of which it does not inquire.
When the meaning of these a.s.sumptions is investigated, we pa.s.s out of the scientific into the philosophic domain. Philosophy has to critically investigate the data of popular thought and of science. It has to discover exactly what is implied in these fundamental principles. Then it has to test their value by erecting a final criterion of truth, by probing the structure of cognition to the bottom, and determining the proper organ of certain or accurate knowledge; or, to put it another way, it has to examine what is meant by reality, whether there is anything real independently of the mind, and if so, what. In doing this it inquires not only what common sense means by its object-world clothed in its variegated garment of secondary qualities, its beauty, and so on, but also what physical science means by its cosmic mechanism of sensible and extra-sensible matter in motion: whether there is any kind of objective reality belonging to the latter which does not also belong to the former; and how the two worlds are related one to another. That is to say, he asks whether the bodies in s.p.a.ce a.s.sumed to exist by the physicist as the antecedent conditions of particular sensations and percepts are independent of mind and perception generally.[152]
In doing all this, philosophy is theoretically free to upset as much of popular belief of the persistent kind as it likes. Nor can science find fault with it so long as it keeps to its own sphere, and does not directly contradict any truth which science, by the methods proper to it, is able to establish. Thus, for example, if philosophy finds that there is nothing real independently of mind, science will be satisfied so long as it finds a meaning for its a.s.sumed ent.i.ties, such as s.p.a.ce, external things, and physical causes.[153]
The student of philosophy need not be told that these imposing-looking problems respecting cognition, making, up what the Germans call the "Theory of Cognition," and the cognate problem respecting the nature of reality, are still a long way from being settled. To-day, as in the days of Plato and Aristotle, are argued, in slightly altered forms, the vexed questions, What is true cognition? Is it a mere efflux from sensation, a pa.s.sive conformity of representation to sensation (sensualism or empiricism)? or is it, on the other hand, a construction of active thought, involving certain necessary forms of intelligence (rationalism or intuitivism)?
Again, how are we to shape to ourselves real objective existence? Is it something wholly independent of the mind (realism)? and if so, is this known to be what we--meaning here common people and men of science alike--represent it as being (natural realism), or something different (transfigured realism)? Or is it, on the contrary, something involving mind (idealism)? and if so, is it a strictly phenomenal distinction within our conscious experience (empirical idealism, phenomenalism), or one of the two poles of subject and object const.i.tuted by every act of thought (rational idealism)? These are some of the questions in philosophy which still await their final answer.
Philosophy being thus still a question and not a solution, we need not here trouble ourselves about its problems further than to remark on their close connection with our special subject, the study of illusion.
Our brief reference to some of the princ.i.p.al inquiries of philosophy shows that it tends to throw doubt on things which the unreflecting popular mind holds to be indubitable. Different schools of philosophy have shown themselves unequally concerned about these so-called intuitive certainties. In general it may be said that philosophy, though, as I have remarked, theoretically free to set up its own standard of certainty, has in practice endeavoured to give a meaning to, and to find a justification for the a.s.sumptions or first principles of science. On the other hand, it has not hesitated, when occasion required, to make very light of the intuitive beliefs of the popular mind as interpreted by itself. Thus, rationalists of the Platonic type have not shrunk from p.r.o.nouncing individual impressions and objects illusory, an a.s.sertion which certainly seems to be opposed to the a.s.sumptions of common sense, if not to those of science. On the other hand, the modern empirical or a.s.sociation school is quite ready to declare that the vulgar belief in an external world, so far as it represents this as independent of mind,[154] is an illusion; that the so-called necessary beliefs respecting ident.i.ty, uniformity, causation, etc., are not, strictly speaking, necessary; and so on. And in these ways it certainly seems to come into conflict with popular convictions, or intuitive certainties, as they present themselves to the unreflecting intelligence.
Philosophy seems, then, to be a continuation of that process of detecting illusion with which science in part concerns itself. Indeed, it is evident that our special study has a very close connection with the philosophic inquiry. What philosophy wants is something intuitively certain as its starting-point, some _point d"appui_ for its construction. The errors incident to the process of reasoning do not greatly trouble it, since these can, in general, be guarded against by the rules of logic. But error in the midst of what, on the face of it, looks like intuitive knowledge naturally raises the question, Is there any kind of absolutely certain cognition, any organ for the accurate perception of truth? And this intimate relation between the scientific and the philosophic consideration of illusion is abundantly ill.u.s.trated in the history of philosophy. The errors of sense, appearing in a region which to the vulgar seems so indubitable, have again and again set men thinking on the question, "What is the whole range of illusion? Is perception, as popularly understood, after all, a big hallucination? Is our life a dream?"[155]
On the other hand, if our study of the wide range of illusion is fitted to induce that temper of mind which is said to be the beginning of philosophy, that att.i.tude of universal doubt expressed by Descartes in his famous maxim, _De omnibus dubitandum_, a consideration of the process of correction is fitted to lead the mind on to the determination of the conditions of accurate knowledge. It is evident, indeed, that the very conception of an illusion implies a criterion of certainty: to call a thing illusory, is to judge it by reference to some accepted standard of truth.
The mental processes involved in detecting, resisting, and overcoming illusion, are a very interesting subject for the psychologist, though we have not s.p.a.ce here to investigate them fully. Turning to presentative, and more particularly sense-illusions, we find that the detection of an illusion takes place now by an appeal from one sense to another, for example, from sight to touch, by way of verification;[156] now (as in Myer"s experiment) by a reference from sense and presentation altogether to representation or remembered experience and a process of reasoning; and now, (as in the illusions of art) conversely, by a transition of mind from what is suggested to the actual sense-impression of the moment. In the sphere of memory, again, illusion is determined, as such, now by attending more carefully to the contents of memory, now by a process of reasoning from some presentative cognition. Finally, errors in our comprehensive general representations of things are known to be such partly by reasoning from other conceptions, and partly by a continual process of reduction of representation to presentation, the general to the particular. I may add that the correction of illusion by an act of reflection and reasoning, which brings the part into consistent relation with the whole of experience, includes throughout the comparison of the individual with the collective or social experience.[157]
We may, perhaps, roughly summarize these operations by saying that they consist in the control of the lower automatic processes (a.s.sociation or suggestion) by the higher activities of conscious will. This activity of will takes the form now of an effort of attention to what is directly present to the mind (sense-impression, internal feeling, mnemonic image, etc.), now of conscious reflection, judgment, and reasoning, by which the error is brought into relation to our experience as a whole, individual and collective.
It is for the philosopher to investigate the inmost nature of these operations as they exhibit themselves in our every-day individual experience, and in the large intellectual movements of history. In no better way can he arrive at what common sense and science regard as certain cognition, at the kinds of knowledge on which they are wont to rely most unhesitatingly.
There is one other relation of our subject to philosophic problems which I have purposely left for final consideration. Our study has consisted mainly in the psychological a.n.a.lysis of illusions supposed to be known or capable of being known as such. Now, the modern a.s.sociation school professes to be able to resolve some of the so-called intuitions of common sense into elements exactly similar to those into which we have here been resolving what are acknowledged by all as illusions. This fact would seem to point to a close connection between the scientific study of illusion and the particular view of these fundamental intuitions taken by one philosophic school. In order to see whether there is really this connection, we must reflect a little further on the nature of the method which we have been pursuing.
I have already had occasion to rise the expression "scientific psychology," or psychology as a positive science, and the meaning of this expression must now be more carefully considered. As a positive science, psychology is limited to the function of a.n.a.lyzing mental states, and of tracing their origin in previous and more simple mental states. It has, strictly speaking, nothing to do with the question of the legitimacy or validity of any mental act.
Take a percept, for example. Psychology can trace its parentage in sensation, the mode in which it has come by its contents in the laws of a.s.sociation. But by common consent, a percept implies a presentative apprehension of an object now present to sense. Is this valid or illusory? This question psychology, as science, does not attempt to answer. It would not, I conceive, answer it even if it were able to make out that the whole mental content in the percept can be traced back to elementary sensations and their combinations. For the fact that in the chemistry of mind elements may combine in perfectly new forms does not disprove that the forms thus arising, whether sentiments or quasi-cognitions, are invalid. Much less can psychology dispute the validity of a percept if it cannot be sure that the mind adds nothing to sensation and its grouping; that in the genesis of the perceptive state, with its intuition of something external and now present as object, nothing like a form of intelligence is superimposed on the elements of sensation, giving to the result of their coalescence the particular unity which we find. Whether psychology as a positive science can ever be sure of this: whether, that is to say, it can answer the question, "How do we come by the idea of object?" without a.s.suming some particular philosophic or extra-scientific theory respecting the ultimate nature of mind, is a point which I purposely leave open.
I would contend, then, that the psychologist, in tracing the genesis of the percept out of previous mental experiences, no more settles the question, What is the object of perception? than the physicist settles it in referring the sense-impression (and so the percept) to a present material agent as its condition.
The same applies to our idea of self. I may discover the concrete experiences which supply the filling in of the idea, and yet not settle the question, Does intelligence add anything in the construction of the form of this idea? and still less settle the question whether there is any real unity answering to the idea.
If this is a correct distinction, if psychology, as science, does not determine questions of validity or objective meaning but only of genesis, if it looks at mental states in relation only to their temporal and causal concomitants and not to their objects, it must follow that our preceding a.n.a.lysis of illusion involves no particular philosophic theory as to the nature of intelligence, but, so far as accurate, consists of scientific facts which all philosophic theories of intelligence must alike be prepared to accept. And I have little doubt that each of the two great opposed doctrines, the intuitive and the a.s.sociational, would claim to be in a position to take up these facts into its particular theory, and to view them in its own way.
But in addition to this scientific psychology, there is another so-called psychology, which is, strictly speaking, philosophic. This, I need hardly say, is the a.s.sociation philosophy. It proceeds by a.n.a.lyzing certain cognitions and sentiments into their elements, and straightway declaring that they mean nothing more than these. That is to say, the a.s.sociationist pa.s.ses from genesis to validity, from the history of a conscious state to its objective meaning. Thus, from showing that an intuitive belief, say that in causation, is not original (in the individual or at least in the race), it goes on to a.s.sert that it is not a valid immediate cognition at all. Now, I am not concerned here to inquire into the logical value of this transition, but simply to point out that it is extra-scientific and distinctly philosophic. If logically justifiable, it is so because of some plainly _philosophic_ a.s.sumption, as that made by Hume, namely, that all ideas not derived from impressions are to this extent fict.i.tious or illusory.
And now we are in a position to understand the bearing of our scientific a.n.a.lysis of acknowledged illusions on the a.s.sociationist"s treatment of the alleged illusions of common sense. There is no doubt, I think, that some of the so-called intuitions of common sense have points of a.n.a.logy to acknowledged illusions. For example, the conviction in the act of perception that something external to the mind and independent of it exists, has a certain superficial resemblance to an hallucination of sense; and moreover, the a.s.sociationist seeks to explain it by means of these very processes which underlie what is recognized by all as sense-illusion.[158] Again, it may be said that our notions of force and of a causal nexus in the physical world imply the idea of conscious energy as known through our muscular sensations, and so have a suspicious resemblance to those anthropomorphic illusions of which I have spoken under Illusions of Insight. Once more, the consciousness of freedom may, as I have suggested, be viewed as a.n.a.logous in its form and its mode of origin to illusions of introspection. As a last example, it may be said that the mind"s certain conviction of the innateness of some of its ideas resembles those illusions of memory which arise through an inability to think ourselves back into a remote past having a type of consciousness widely unlike that of the present.
But now, mark the difference. In our scientific a.n.a.lysis of popularly known illusions, we had something by which to determine the illusory character of the presentation or belief. We had a popularly or scientifically accepted standard of certainty, by a reference to which we might test the particular _soi-disant_ cognition. But in the case of these fundamental beliefs we have no such criterion, except we adopt some particular philosophic theory, say that of the a.s.sociationist himself. Hence this similarity in structure and origin cannot in itself be said to amount to a proof of equality of logical or objective value.
Here again it must be remarked that origin, does not carry validity or invalidity with it.[159]
We thus come back to our starting-point. While there are close relations, psychological and logical, between the scientific study of the ascertained facts of illusion and the philosophic determination of what is illusory in knowledge as a whole, the two domains must be clearly distinguished. On purely scientific ground we cannot answer the question, "How far does illusion extend?" The solution of this question must be handed over to the philosopher, as one aspect of his problem of cognition.
One or two remarks may, perhaps, be hazarded in concluding this account of the relation of the scientific to the philosophic problem of illusion. Science, as we have seen, takes its stand on a stable consensus, a body of commonly accepted belief. And this being so, it would seem to follow, that so far as she is allowed to interest herself in philosophic questions, she will naturally be disposed to ask, What beliefs are shared in by all minds, so far as normal and developed? In other words, she will be inclined to look at universality as the main thing to be determined in the region of philosophic inquiry. The metaphysical sceptic, fond of daring exploits, may break up as many accepted ideas as he likes into illusory _debris_, provided only he has some bit of reality left to take his stand on. Meanwhile, the scientific mind, here agreeing with the practical mind, will ask, "Will the beliefs thus said to be capable of being shown to be illusory ever cease to exercise their hold on men"s minds, including that of the iconoclast himself? Is the mode of demonstration of such a kind as to be likely ever to materially weaken the common-sense "intuition"?"
This question would seem to be most directly answerable by an appeal to individual testimony. Viewed in this light, it is a question for the present, for some few already allege that in their case philosophic reasonings exercise an appreciable effect on these beliefs. And so far as this is so, the man of scientific temper will feel that there is a question for him.
It is evident, however, that the question of the persistence of these fundamental beliefs is much more one for the future than for the present. The correction of a clearly detected illusion is, as I have more than once remarked, a slow process. An illusion such as the apparent movement of the sun will persist as a partially developed error long after it has been convicted. And it may be that the fundamental beliefs here referred to, even if presumably illusory, are destined to exercise their spell for long ages yet.
Whether this will be the case or not, whether these intuitive beliefs are destined slowly to decay and be dissolved as time rolls on, or whether they will retain an eternal youth, is a question which we of to-day seem, on a first view of the matter, to have no way of answering which does not a.s.sume the very point in question--the truth or falsity of the belief. This much may, however, be said. The a.s.sociationist who resolves these erroneous intuitions into the play of a.s.sociation, admits that the forces at work generating and consolidating the illusory belief are constant and permanent forces, and such as are not likely to be less effective in the future than they have been in the past. Thus, he teaches that the intuition of the single object in the act of perception owes its strength to "inseparable a.s.sociation," according to which law the ideas of the separate "possibilities of sensation," which are all we know of the object, coalesce in the shape of an idea of a single uniting substance. He adds, perhaps, that heredity has tended, and will still tend, to fix the habit of thus transforming an actual multiplicity into an imaginary unity. And in thus arguing, he is allowing that the illusion is one which, to say the least of it, it will always be exceedingly difficult for reason to dislodge.
In view of this uncertainty, and of the possibility, if not the probability, of these beliefs remaining as they have remained, at least approximately universal, the man of science will probably be disposed to hold himself indifferently to the question. He will be inclined to say, "What does it matter whether you call such an apparently permanent belief the correlative of a reality or an illusion? Does it make any practical difference whether a universal "intuition," of which we cannot rid ourselves, be described as a uniformly recurring fiction of the imagination, or an integral const.i.tutive factor of intelligence? And, in considering the historical aspect of the question, does it not come to much the same thing whether such permanent mental products be spoken of as the attenuated forms or ghostly survivals of more substantial primitive illusions (for example, anthropomorphic representations of material objects, "animistic" representations of mind and personality), or as the slowly perfected results of intellectual evolution?"
This att.i.tude of the scientific mind towards philosophic problems will be confirmed when it is seen that those who seek to resolve stable common convictions into illusions are forced, by their very mode of demonstration, to allow these intuitions a measure of validity. Thus, the ideas of the unity and externality attributed to the object in the act of perception are said by the a.s.sociationist to answer to a matter of fact, namely, the permanent coexistence of certain possibilities of sensation, and the dependence of the single sensations of the individual on the presence of the most permanent of these possibilities, namely, those of the active or muscular and pa.s.sive sensations of touch, which are, moreover, by far the most constant for all minds. Similarly, the idea of a necessary connection between cause and effect, even if illusory in so far as it expresses an _objective_ necessity, is allowed to be true as an expression of that uniformity of our experience which all scientific progress tends to ill.u.s.trate more and more distinctly.
And even the idea of a permanent self, as distinct from particular fugitive feelings, is admitted by the a.s.sociationist to be correct in so far as it expresses the fact that mind is "a series of feelings which is aware of itself as past and future." In short, these "illusory intuitions," by the showing of those who affirm them to be illusory, are by no means hallucinations having no real object as their correlative, but merely illusions in the narrow sense, and illusions, moreover, in which the ratio of truth to error seems to be a large one.
It would thus appear that philosophy tends, after all, to unsettle what appear to be permanent convictions of the common mind and the presuppositions of science much less than is sometimes imagined. Our intuitions of external realities, our indestructible belief in the uniformity of nature, in the nexus of cause and effect, and so on, are, by the admission of all philosophers, at least partially and _relatively_ true; that is to say, true in relation to certain features of our common experience. At the worst, they can only be called illusory as slightly misrepresenting the exact results of this experience. And even so, the misrepresentation must, by the very nature of the case, be practically insignificant. And so in full view of the subtleties of philosophic speculation, the man of science may still feel justified in regarding his standard of truth, a stable consensus of belief, as above suspicion.
THE END