Dr. Abbott gave an interesting lecture at Toynbee Hall last
Saturday on "Illusions," which he distinguished from " Delusions " as being natural and, so to say, healthy mistakes which lead to their own correction ; delusions, on the other hand, he described as morbid and unhealthy mistakes, which show that the mind is warped and on a false track. He pointed out that Bacon had spoken of God as playing a game of hide-and-seek with his children in which he desires to be found out,—in other words, as stimulating us to disen- tangle for ourselves the true from the apparent. Thus men naturally suppose that it is the sun which moves, and the earth which remains relatively fixed ; and for the greater part of human history, that was the illusion which science ultimately removed. So, too, light conveys to us the notion of something that exists at the moment we see it, whereas there are fixed stars which have ceased to emit light for many years before we cease to see them ; and, again, we suppose a clap of thunder or the report of a gun to occur when we hear it, though it really occurred a few seconds earlier. The love of the marvellous was, he said, a frequent source of illusion ; and the illusion of neighbourhood,—i.e., the illusion due to exaggerating the importance of what is close to us,—is another not less frequent. Then there is the illusion of ignorance,—omne ignoium pro magnifico,—and the illusion of distance, which leads us to put God to an immense distance from us, instead of seeking for him in our own hearts. It is impossible, Dr. Abbott said, to escape illusion. Whit we have to do is to try and discover the sources of subjective error to which we are most liable, and to allow for them. The lecture seems to have been an excellent one, though we are not sure whether Dr. Abbott warned his hearers against illusions of incredulity, to which we are at least as liable as to credulous illusions, and perhaps more specially liable in the present age, as the Duke of Argyll hints in his interesting letter published in another column.
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