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 constitutive 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 attitude 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 associationist 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 passive 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 illustrate more and more distinctly.
And even the idea of a permanent self, as distinct from particular
fugitive feelings, is admitted by the associationist 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 th