LATER GERMAN PHILOSOPHY 1 69 



oiir cognitive faculty is an eiTor, and zve 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 conscious- 

 ness far richer and more various than we had sus- 

 pected, 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 \vc gradually 

 rise to the conception of the self-resource and self- 

 sufficiency of our intelligence. The power of detect- 

 ing 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 



