Illusions | Page 7

which has any appearance of being directly reached,
immediate, or self-evident, that is to say, of not being inferred from
other knowledge, may be divided into four principal varieties: Internal
Perception or Introspection of the mind's own feelings; External
Perception; Memory; and Belief, in so far as it simulates the form of
direct knowledge. The first is illustrated in a man's consciousness of a
present feeling of pain or pleasure. The second and the third kinds have
already been spoken of, and are too familiar to require illustration. It is
only needful to remark here that, under perception, or rather in close
conjunction with it, I purpose dealing with the knowledge of other's
feelings, in so far as this assumes the aspect of immediate knowledge.
The term belief is here used to include expectations and any other kinds
of conviction that do not fall under one of the other heads. An instance

of a seemingly immediate belief would be a prophetic prevision of a
coming disaster, or a man's unreasoned persuasion as to his own
powers of performing a difficult task.
It is, indeed, said by many thinkers that there are no legitimate
immediate beliefs; that all our expectations and other convictions about
things, in so far as they are sound, must repose on other genuinely
immediate knowledge, more particularly sense-perception and memory.
This difficult question need not be discussed here. It is allowed by all
that there is a multitude of beliefs which we hold tenaciously and on
which we are ready to act, which, to the mature mind, wear the
appearance of intuitive truths, owing their cogency to nothing beyond
themselves. A man's belief in his own merits, however it may have
been first obtained, is as immediately assured to him as his recognition
of a real object in the act of sense-perception. It may be added that
many of our every-day working beliefs about the world in which we
live, though presumably derived from memory and perception, tend to
lose all traces of their origin, and to simulate the aspect of intuitions.
Thus the proposition that logicians are in the habit of pressing on our
attention, that "Men are mortal," seems, on the face of it, to common
sense to be something very like a self-evident truth, not depending on
any particular facts of experience.
In calling these four forms of cognition immediate, I must not, however,
be supposed to be placing them on the same logical level. It is plain,
indeed, to a reflective mind that, though each may be called immediate
in this superficial sense, there are perceptible differences in the degree
of their immediacy. Thus it is manifest, after a moment's reflection, that
expectation, so far as it is just, is not primarily immediate in the sense
in which purely presentative knowledge is so, since it can be shown to
follow from something else. So a general proposition, though through
familiarity and innumerable illustrations it has acquired a self-evident
character, is seen with a very little inspection to be less fundamentally
and essentially so than the proposition, "I am now feeling pain;" and it
will be found that even with respect to memory, when the remembered
event is at all remote, the process of cognition approximates to a
mediate operation, namely, one of inference. What the relative values

of these different kinds of immediate knowledge are is a point which
will have to be touched on at the end of our study. Here it must suffice
to warn the reader against the supposition that this value is assumed to
be identical.
It might seem at a first glance to follow from this four-fold scheme of
immediate or quasi-immediate knowledge that there are four varieties
of illusion. And this is true in the sense that these four heads cover all
the main varieties of illusion. If there are only four varieties of
knowledge which can lay any claim to be considered immediate, it
must be that every illusion will simulate the form of one of these
varieties, and so be referable to the corresponding division.
But though there are conceivably these four species of illusion, it does
not follow that there are any actual instances of each class forthcoming.
This we cannot determine till we have investigated the nature and
origin of illusory error. For example, it might be found that
introspection, or the immediate inspection of our own feelings or
mental states, does not supply the conditions necessary to the
production of such error. And, indeed, it is probable that most persons,
antecedently to inquiry, would be disposed to say that to fall into error
in the observation of what is actually going on in our own minds is
impossible.
With the exception of this first division, however, this scheme may
easily be seen to answer