Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/230

Rh our cognitive faculty is an error, and we ought to correct it by disregarding its cause.

It is idle to say that we cannot do this because the illusion is organic, and will therefore continue to play upon us forever. When it is once detected, it is completely in our power, so far as concerns its affecting our judgment. The presence of organic illusions in our faculty of cognition, especially in its function of sense-perception, is an unquestionable fact, — the multiform phenomena of refraction, for instance, — but from the moment we know them as organic they cannot mislead us; because, to know them so, we must have traced them to an origin in the necessary laws of the function they affect. Thenceforward we learn to interpret them, — as signs, namely, of a complexity in our system of consciousness far richer and more various than we had suspected, signs of a far more intricate harmony of antagonisms than we had dreamed of; and the more wide-embracing their recurrences become, each time detected and corrected, the more do we gradually rise to the conception of the self-resource and self-sufficiency of our intelligence. The power of detecting and allowing for them comes just from their being organic, and depends upon that.

Therefore, precisely by the investigation through which Lange has led us, we are now in the position to assure ourselves of the reality, the absoluteness in