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It is that the first task of a philosophy of science should be some general classification of the entities disclosed to us in sense-perception. Among the examples of entities in addition to 'events' which we have used for the purpose of illustration are the buildings of Bedford College, Homer, and sky-blue.
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.
Hence the fact of sense-perception has an ingredient or factor which is not thought. I call this ingredient sense-awareness. It is indifferent to my argument whether sense-perception has or has not thought as another ingredient. If sense-perception does not involve thought, then sense-awareness and sense-perception are identical.
However, I do assert this further statement; namely, that though natural science is concerned with nature which is the terminus of sense-perception, it is not concerned with the sense-awareness itself. I repeat the main line of this argument, and expand it in certain directions. Thought about nature is different from the sense-perception of nature.
But Bosanquet's carefully framed definition of the beautiful, in his History of Aesthetic, endeavors, like Browning, to adjust the different claims of form and significance: "The beautiful is that which has characteristic or individual expressiveness for sense-perception or imagination, subject to the conditions of general or abstract expressiveness in the same medium."
Every author probably has undergone the experience of finding that ideas which started up to his mind as fresh creations, were unconscious reminiscences of his own or of somebody else's ideas. In the case of present emotional states this liability to confuse the present and the past is far greater. Here there is something hardly distinguishable from an active illusion of sense-perception.
A knowledge of medicine was destined to correct that defect, and we shall mark the growth of its most precious fruits in the increased power of observation and the counterpoise it offered to hasty generalizations, as well as in the confidence which learnt to reject untenable fictions, whether produced by luxuriant imagination or by a priori speculations, on the similar ground of self-reliant sense-perception."
In the following discussion of the subject I shall depart from the above order in so far as to set out with illusions of sense-perception. These are well ascertained, forming, indeed, the best-marked variety. And the explanation of these has been carried much further than that of the others.
Taking this view of illusion, we may provisionally define it as any species of error which counterfeits the form of immediate, self-evident, or intuitive knowledge, whether as sense-perception or otherwise. Whenever a thing is believed on its own evidence and not as a conclusion from something else, and the thing then believed is demonstrably wrong, there is an illusion.
This is exactly what I am endeavouring to do in these lectures. I ask what it is that we are aware of in our sense-perception of nature. I then proceed to examine those factors in nature which lead us to conceive nature as occupying space and persisting through time. This procedure has led us to an investigation of the characters of space and time.
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