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It is the fact itself which concerns us here. In the course of our investigations we shall discover the peculiarity in human nature which during the first phase, now ended, of man's struggle towards scientific awareness has caused this renunciation of all sense-experiences except those which come to man through the sight of a single colour-blind eye.
What we say is here already true in advance of special verification, IF WE HAVE SUBSUMED OUR OBJECTS RIGHTLY. Our ready- made ideal framework for all sorts of possible objects follows from the very structure of our thinking. We can no more play fast and loose with these abstract relations than we can do so with our sense-experiences.
As has been already pointed out, it is the great merit of Kant that he started afresh on the track indicated by Descartes, and steadily upheld the doctrine of the existence of elements of consciousness, which are neither sense-experiences nor any modifications of them.
We need not deny that dreams and delirium may have given palpable shape to the conception of a ghost, and may also have helped forward the notion of a spirit by furnishing something intermediary between the grossness of our waking sense-experiences, and the altogether elusive and difficult thought of unembodied will and intelligence independent of space and time.
I associate every such intelligent agent with a particular series or group of sense-experiences, and further I assume that the world at his Presentment, consists for him in a similar series of transmutations continuously going on in that portion of the energetic system which I believe in a similar way to constitute such person's bodily organism.
And so it differs from the object in sense-perception in so far as this last involves sense-experiences, as muscular and tactual feelings, which are not at the moment presentatively known to any mind. Illusions of Insight. And now we are in a position, perhaps, to define an illusion of insight, and to inquire whether there is anything answering to our definition.
For we have learned that we human creatures will never know the absolute or the essence, that notions, which Plato took for realities, are mere relative conceptions; that virtue and truth are social ideals and intellectual abstractions, while beauty is a quality found primarily and literally only in material existences and sense-experiences; and every day we are hearing of new discoveries connecting our æsthetic emotions with the structure of eye and ear, the movement of muscles, the functions of nerve centres, nay, even with the action of heart and lungs and viscera.
The two experiences are, nevertheless, not the same; and every one knows that they are not the same. One difference that roughly marks out the two classes of experiences from one another is that, as a rule, our sense-experiences are more vivid than are the images that exist in the imagination. I say, as a rule, for we cannot always remark this difference.
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