Illusions : a psychological study / by James Sully.

  • James Sully
Date:
1882
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Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Illusions : a psychological study / by James Sully. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    presses 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 hal- lucinations 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 con- victions 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 mis- representation 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.
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