The foregoing study of illusions may not improbably have had a bewildering effect on the mind of the reader. To keep the mental eye, like the bodily eye, for any time intently fixed on one object is apt to produce a feeling of giddiness. And in the case of a subject like illusion, the effect is enormously increased by the disturbing character of the object looked at. Indeed, the first feeling produced by our survey of the wide field of illusory error might be expressed pretty accurately by the despondent cry of the poet—

"Alas! it is delusion all:
The future cheats us from afar,
Nor can we be what we recall,
Nor dare we think on what we are."

It must be confessed that our study has tended to bring home to the mind the wide range of the illusory and unreal in our intellectual life. In sense-perception, in the introspection of the mind's own feelings, in the reading of others' feelings, in memory, and finally in belief, we have found a large field for illusory cognition. And while illusion has thus so great a depth in the individual mind, it has a no less striking breadth or extent in the collective human mind. No doubt its grosser forms manifest themselves most conspicuously in the undisciplined mind of the savage and the rustic; yet even the cultivated mind is by no means free from its control. In truth, most of the illusions illustrated in this work are such as can be shared in by all classes of mind.

In view of this wide far-reaching area of ascertained error, the mind naturally asks, What are the real limits of illusory cognition, and how can we be ever sure of having got beyond them? This question leads us on to philosophical problems of the greatest consequence, problems which can only be very lightly touched in this place. Before approaching these, let us look back a little more carefully and gather up our results, reflect on the method which we have been unconsciously adopting, and inquire how far this scientific mode of procedure will take us in determining what is the whole range of illusory cognition.

We have found an ingredient of illusion mixed up with all the popularly recognized forms of immediate knowledge. Yet this ingredient is not equally conspicuous in all cases. First of all, illusion varies very considerably in its degree of force and persistence. Thus, in general, a presentative illusion is more coercive than a representative; an apparent reality present to the mind is naturally felt to be more indubitable than one absent and only represented. On the other hand, a representative illusion is often more enduring than a presentative, that is to say, less easily found out. It is to be added that a good deal of illusion is only partial, there being throughout an under-current of rational consciousness, a gentle play of self-criticism, which keeps the error from developing into a perfect self-delusion. This remark applies not only to the innocent illusions of art, but also to many of our every-day illusions, both presentative and representative. In many cases, indeed, as, for example, in looking at a reflection in a mirror, the illusion is very imperfect, remaining in the nascent stage.

Again, a little attention to the facts here brought together will show that the proportion of illusory to real knowledge is far from being the same in each class of immediate or quasi-immediate cognition. Thus, with respect to the great distinction between presentative and representative knowledge, it is to be observed that, in so far as any act of cognition is, strictly speaking, presentative, it does not appear to admit of error. The illusions of perception are connected with the representative side of the process, and are numerous just because this is so extensive. On the other hand, in introspection, where the scope of independent representation is so limited, the amount of illusion is very inconsiderable, and may in practice be disregarded. So again, to take a narrower group of illusions, we find that in the recalling of distant events the proportion of error is vastly greater than in the recalling of near events.

So much as to the extent of illusion as brought to light by our preceding study. Let us now glance at the conclusions obtained respecting its nature and its causes.

Causes of Illusion.

Looking at illusion as a whole, and abstracting from the differences of mental mechanism in the processes of perception, memory, etc., we may say that the rationale or mode of genesis of illusion is very much the same throughout. Speaking broadly, one may describe all knowledge as a correspondence of representation with fact or experience, or as a stable condition of the representation which cannot be disturbed by new experiences. It does not matter, for our present purpose, whether the fact represented is supposed to be directly present, as in presentative cognition; or to be absent, either as something past or future, or finally as a "general fact," that is to say, the group of facts (past and future) embodied in a universal proposition.[147]

In general this accordance between our representations and facts is secured by the laws of our intellectual mechanism. It follows from the principles of association that our simple experiences, external and internal, will tend to reflect themselves in perception, memory, expectation, and general belief, in the very time-connections in which they actually occur. To put it briefly, facts which occur together will in general be represented together, and they will be the more perfectly co-represented in proportion to the frequency of this concurrence.

Illusion, as distinguished from correct knowledge, is, to put it broadly, deviation of representation from fact. This is due in part to limitations and defects in the intellectual mechanism itself, such as the imperfections of the activities of attention, discrimination, and comparison, in relation to what is present. Still more is it due to the control of our mental processes by association and habit. These forces, which are at the very root of intelligence, are also, in a sense, the originators of error. Through the accidents of our experience or the momentary condition of our reproductive power, representations get wrongly grouped with presentations and with one another; wrongly grouped, that is to say, according to a perfect or ideal standard, namely, that the grouping should always exactly agree with the order of experience as a whole, and the force of cohesion be proportionate to the number of the conjunctions of this experience.

This great source of error has been so abundantly illustrated under the head of Passive Illusions that I need not dwell on it further. It is plain that a passive error of perception, or of expectation, is due in general to a defective grouping of elements, to a grouping which answers, perhaps, to the run of the individual's actual experience, but not to a large and complete common experience.[148] Similarly, an illusory general belief is plainly a welding together of elements (here concepts, answering to innumerable representative images) in disagreement with the permanent connections of experience. Even a passive illusion of memory, in so far as it involves a rearrangement of successive representations, shows the same kind of defect.

In the second place, this incorrect grouping maybe due, not to defects in attention and discrimination, combined with insufficiently grounded association, but to the independent play of constructive imagination and the caprices of feeling. This is illustrated in what I have called Active Illusions, whether the excited perceptions and the hallucinations of sense, or the fanciful projections of memory or of expectation. Here we have a force directly opposed to that of experience. Active illusion arises, not through the imperfections of the intellectual mechanism, but through a palpable interference with this mechanism. It is a regrouping of elements which simulates the form of a suggestion by experience, but is, in reality, the outcome of the individual mind's extra-intellectual impulses.

We see, then, that, in spite of obvious differences in the form, the process in all kinds of immediate cognition is fundamentally identical. It is essentially a bringing together of elements, whether similar or dissimilar and associated by a link of contiguity, and a viewing of these as connected parts, of a whole; it is a process of synthesis. And illusion, in all its forms, is bad grouping or carelessly performed synthesis. This holds good even of the simplest kinds of error in which a presentative element is wrongly classed; and it holds good of those more conspicuous errors of perception, memory, expectation, and compound belief, in which representations connect themselves in an order not perfectly answering to the objective order.

This view of the nature and causes of illusion is clearly capable of being expressed in physical language. Bad grouping of psychical elements is equivalent to imperfect co-ordination of their physical, that is to say, nervous, conditions, imperfect in the evolutionist's sense, as not exactly according with external relations. So far as illusions of suggestion (passive illusions) are concerned, the error is connected with organized tendencies, due to a limited action of experience. On the other hand, illusions of preconception (active illusions) usually involve no such deeply fixed or permanent organic connections, but merely a temporary confluence of nerve-processes.[149] The nature of the physical process is best studied in the case of errors of sense-perception. Yet we may hypothetically argue that even in the case of the most complex errors, as those of memory and of belief, there is implied a deviation in the mode of connection of nervous structures (whether the connection be permanent or temporary) from the external order of facts.

And now we are in a position to see whether illusion is ultimately distinguishable from other modes of error, namely, those incident to conscious processes of reasoning. It must have been plain to an attentive reader throughout our exposition that, in spite of our provisional distinction, no sharp line can be drawn between much of what, on the surface, looks like immediate knowledge, and consciously derived or inferred knowledge. On its objective side, reasoning may be roughly defined as a conscious transition of mind from certain facts or relations of facts to other facts or relations recognized as similar. According to this definition, a fallacy would be a hasty, unwarranted transition to new cases not identical with the old. And a good part of immediate knowledge is fundamentally the same, only that here, through the exceptional force of association and habit, the transition is too rapid to be consciously recognized. Consequently, illusion becomes identified at bottom with fallacious inference: it may be briefly described as collapsed inference. Thus, illusory perception and expectation are plainly a hasty transition of mind from old to new, from past to present, conjunctions of experience.[150] And, as we have seen, an illusory general belief owes its existence to a coalescence of representations of known facts or connections with products of imagination which simulate the appearance of inferences from these facts.

In the case of memory, in so far as it is not aided by reasoning from present signs, there seems to be nothing like a movement of inference. It is evident, indeed, that memory is involved in and underlies every such transition of thought. Illusions of memory illustrate rather a process of wrong classing, that is to say, of wrongly identifying the present mental image with past fact, which is the initial step in all inference. In this way they closely resemble those slight errors of perception which are due to erroneous classing of sense-impressions. But since the intellectual process involved in assimilating mental elements is very similar to that implied in assimilating complex groups of such elements, we may say that even in these simple kinds of error there is something which resembles a wrong classing of relations, something, therefore, which approximates in character to a fallacy.

By help of this brief review of the nature and causes of illusion, we see that in general it may be spoken of as deviation of individual from common experience. This applies to passive illusion in so far as it follows from the accidents of individual experience, and it still more obviously applies to active illusion as due to the vagaries of individual feeling and constructive imagination. We might, perhaps, characterize all illusion as partial view, partial both in the sense of being incomplete, and in the other sense of being that to which the mind by its peculiar predispositions inclines. This being so, we may very roughly describe all illusion as abnormal. Just as hallucination, the most signal instance of illusion, is distinctly on the border-land of healthy and unhealthy mental life; just as dreams are in the direction of such unhealthy mental action; so the lesser illusions of memory and so on are abnormal in the sense that they imply a departure from a common typical mode of intellectual action.

It is plain, indeed, that this is the position we have been, taking up throughout our discussion of illusion. We have assumed that what is common and normal is true, or answers to what is objectively real. Thus, in dealing with errors of perception, we took for granted that the common percept—meaning by this what is permanent in the individual and the general experience—is at the same time the true percept. So in discussing the illusions of memory we estimated objective time by the judgment of the average man, free from individual bias, and apart from special circumstances favourable to error. Similarly, in the case of belief, true belief was held to be that which men in general, or in the long run, or on the average, hold true, as distinguished from what the individual under variable and accidental influences holds true. And even in the case of introspection we found that true cognition resolved itself into a consensus or agreement as to certain psychical facts.

Criterion of Illusion.

Now, it behoves us here to examine this assumption, with the view of seeing how far it is perfectly sound. For it may be that what is commonly held true does not in all cases strictly answer to the real, in which case our idea of illusion would have to be extended so as to include certain common beliefs. This question was partly opened up at the close of the last chapter. It will be found that the full discussion of it carries us beyond the scientific point of view altogether. For the present, however, let us see what can be said about it from that standpoint of positive science to which we have hitherto been keeping.

Now, if by common be meant what has been shared by all minds or the majority of minds up to a particular time, a moment's inspection of the process of correcting illusion will show that science assumes the possibility of a common illusion. In the history of discovery, the first assault on an error was the setting up of the individual against the society. The men who first dared to say that the sun did not move round the earth found to their cost what it was to fly in the face of a common, though illusory, perception of the senses.[151]

If, however, by common be understood what is permanently and unshakably held true by men in proportion as their minds become enlightened, then science certainly does assume the truth of common perception and belief. Thus, the progress of the physical sciences may be described as a movement towards a new, higher, and more stable consensus of ideas and beliefs. In point of fact, the truths accepted by men of science already form a body of common belief for those who are supposed by all to have the means of testing the value of their convictions. And the same applies to the successive improvements in the conceptions of the moral sciences, for example, history and psychology. Indeed, the very meaning of science appears to be a body of common cognition to which all minds converge in proportion to their capabilities and opportunities of studying the particular subject-matter concerned.

Not only so, from a strictly scientific point of view it might seem possible to prove that common cognition, as defined above, must in general be true cognition. I refer here to the now familiar method of the evolutionist.

According to this doctrine, which is a scientific method in so far as it investigates the historical developments of mind or the order of mental phenomena in time, cognition may be viewed as a part of the result of the interaction of external agencies and the organism, as an incident of the great process of adaptation, physical and psychical, of organism to environment. In thus looking at cognition, the evolutionist is making the assumption which all science makes, namely, that correct views are correspondences between internal (mental) relations and external (physical) relations, incorrect views disagreements between these relations. From this point of view he may proceed to argue that the intellectual processes must tend to conform to external facts. All correspondence, he tells us, means fitness to external conditions and practical efficiency, all want of correspondence practical incompetence. Consequently, those individuals in whom the correspondence was more complete and exact would have an advantage in the struggle for existence and so tend to be preserved. In this way the process of natural selection, by separately adjusting individual representations to actualities, would make them converge towards a common meeting-point or social standard of true cognition. That is to say, by eliminating or at least greatly circumscribing the region of individual illusion, natural selection would exclude the possibility of a persistent common illusion.

Not only so, the evolutionist may say that this coincidence between common beliefs and true beliefs would be furthered by social as well as individual competition. A community has an advantage in the struggle with other communities when it is distinguished by the presence of the conditions of effective co-operation, such as mutual confidence. Among these conditions a body of true knowledge seems to be of the first importance, since conjoint action always presupposes common beliefs, and, to be effective action, implies that these beliefs are correct. Consequently, it may be argued, the forces at work in the action of man on man, of society on the individual, in the way of assimilating belief, must tend, in the long run, to bring about a coincidence between representations and facts. Thus, in another way, natural selection would help to adjust our ideas to realities, and to exclude the possibility of anything like a permanent common error.

Yet once more, according to Mr. Herbert Spencer, the tendency to agreement between our ideas and the environment would be aided by what he calls the direct process of adaptation. The exercise of a function tends to the development of that function. Thus, our acts of perception must become more exact by mere repetition. So, too, the representations and concepts growing out of perceptions must tend to approximate to external facts by the direct action of the environment on our physical and psychical organism; for external relations which are permanent will, in the long run, stamp themselves on our nervous and mental structure more deeply and indelibly than relations which are variable and accidental.

It would seem, from all this, that so long as we are keeping to the scientific point of view, that is to say, taking for granted that there is something objectively real answering to our perceptions and conceptions, the question of the possibility of a universal or (permanently) common illusion does not arise. Yet a little more reflection will show us that it may arise in a way. So far as the logical sufficiency of the social consensus or common belief is accepted as scientifically proved, it is open to suspicion on strictly scientific grounds. The evolutionist's proof involves one or two assumptions which are not exactly true.

In the first place, it is not strictly correct to say that all illusion involves a practical unfitness to circumstances. At the close of our investigation of particular groups of illusion, for example, those of perception and memory, it was pointed out that many of the errors reviewed were practically harmless, being either momentary and evanescent, or of such a character as not to lead to injurious action. And now, by glancing back over the field of illusion as a whole, we may see the same thing. The day-dreams in which some people are apt to indulge respecting the remote future have little effect on their conduct. So, too, a man's general view of the world is often unrelated to his daily habits of life. It seems to matter exceedingly little, in general, whether a person take up the geocentric or the heliocentric conception of the cosmic structure, or even whether he adopt an optimistic or pessimistic view of life and its capabilities.

So inadequate, indeed, does the agency of natural selection seem to be to eliminate illusion, that it may even be asked whether its tendency may not be sometimes to harden and fix rather than to dissolve and dissipate illusory ideas and beliefs. It will at once occur to the reader that the illusion of self-esteem, discussed in the last chapter, may have been highly useful as subserving individual self-preservation. In a similar way, it has been suggested by Schopenhauer that the illusion of the lover owes its force and historical persistence to its paramount utility for the preservation of the species. And to pass from a recurring individual to a permanently common belief, it is maintained by the same pessimist and his followers that what they regard as the illusion of optimism, namely, the idea that human life as a whole is good, grows out of the individual's irrational love of life, which is only the same instinctive impulse of self-preservation appearing as conscious desire. Once more, it has been suggested that the belief in free-will, even if illusory, would be preserved by the process of evolution, owing to its paramount utility in certain stages of moral development. All this seems to show at least the possibility of a kind of illusion which would tend to perpetuate itself, and to appear as a permanent common belief.

Now, so far as this is the case, so far as illusion is useful or only harmless, natural selection cannot, it is plain, be counted on to weed it out, keeping it within the narrow limits of the exceptional and individual. Natural selection gets rid of what is harmful only, and is indifferent to what is practically harmless.

It may, however, still be said that the process of direct adaptation must tend to establish such a consensus of true belief. Now, I do not wish for a moment to dispute that the growth of intelligence by the continual exercise of its functions tends to such a consensus: this is assumed to be the case by everybody. What I want to point out is that there is no scientific proof of this position.

The correspondence of internal to external relations is obviously limited by the modes of action of the environment on the organism, consequently by the structure of the organism itself. Scientific men are familiar with the idea that there may be forces in the environment which are practically inoperative on the organism, there being no corresponding mode of sensibility. And even if it be said that our present knowledge of the material world, including the doctrine of the conservation of energy, enables us to assert that there is no mode of force wholly unknown to us, it can still be contended that the environment may, for aught we know, be vastly more than the forces of which, owing to the nature of our organism, we know it to be composed. In short, since, on the evolution theory viewed as a scientific doctrine, the real external world does not directly mirror itself in our minds, but only indirectly brings our perceptions and representations into adjustment by bringing into adjustment the nervous organism with which they are somehow connected, it is plain that we cannot be certain of adequately apprehending the external reality which is here assumed to exist.

Science, then, cannot prove, but must assume the coincidence between permanent common intuitions and objective reality. To raise the question whether this coincidence is perfect or imperfect, whether all common intuitions known to be persistent are true or whether there are any that are illusory, is to pass beyond the scientific point of view to another, namely, the philosophic. Thus, our study of illusion naturally carries us on from scientific to philosophic reflection. Let me try to make this still more clear.

Transition to Philosophic View.

All science makes certain assumptions which it never examines. Thus, the physicist assumes that when we experience a sensation we are acted on by some pre-existing external object which is the cause, or at least one condition, of the sensation. While resolving the secondary qualities of light, sound, etc., into modes of motion, while representing the object very differently from the unscientific mind, he agrees with this in holding to the reality of something external, regarding this as antecedent to and therefore as independent of the particular mind which receives the sense-impression. Again, he assumes the uniformity of nature, the universality of the causal relation, and so on.

Similarly, the modern psychologist, when confining himself within the limits of positive science, and treating mind phenomenally or empirically, or, in other words, tracing the order of mental states in time and assigning their conditions, takes for granted much the same as physical science does. Thus, as our foregoing analysis of perception shows, he assumes that there is an external cause of our sensations, that there are material bodies in space, which act on our sense-organs and so serve as the condition of our sense-impressions. More than this, he regards, in the way that has been illustrated in this work, the percept itself, in so far as it is a process in time, as the normal result of the action of such external agents on our nerve-structures, in other words, as the effect of such action in the case of the healthy and perfect nervous organism with the average organized dispositions, physical and psychical; in which case he supposes the percept to correspond, in certain respects at least, with the external cause as made known by physical science. And, on the other hand, he looks on a false or illusory percept as arising in another way not involving, as its condition, the pre-existence of a corresponding material body or physical agent. And in this view of perception, as of other mental phenomena, the psychologist clearly takes for granted the principle that all mental events conform to the law of causation. Further, he assumes that the individual mind is somehow, in a way which it is not his province to inquire into, one and the same throughout, and so on.

The doctrine of evolution, too, in so far as scientific—that is, aiming at giving an account of the historical and pre-historical developments of the collective mind in time—agrees with psychology in making like assumptions. Thus, it conceives an external agency (the environment) as the cause of our common sensations and perceptions. That is to say, it represents the external world as somehow antecedent to, and so apparently independent of, the perceptions which are adjusted to it. And all this shows that science, while removed from vulgar unenlightened opinion, takes sides with popular thought in assuming the truth of certain fundamental ideas or so-called intuitive beliefs, into the exact meaning of which it does not inquire.

When the meaning of these assumptions is investigated, we pass out of the scientific into the philosophic domain. Philosophy has to critically investigate the data of popular thought and of science. It has to discover exactly what is implied in these fundamental principles. Then it has to test their value by erecting a final criterion of truth, by probing the structure of cognition to the bottom, and determining the proper organ of certain or accurate knowledge; or, to put it another way, it has to examine what is meant by reality, whether there is anything real independently of the mind, and if so, what. In doing this it inquires not only what common sense means by its object-world clothed in its variegated garment of secondary qualities, its beauty, and so on, but also what physical science means by its cosmic mechanism of sensible and extra-sensible matter in motion: whether there is any kind of objective reality belonging to the latter which does not also belong to the former; and how the two worlds are related one to another. That is to say, he asks whether the bodies in space assumed to exist by the physicist as the antecedent conditions of particular sensations and percepts are independent of mind and perception generally.[152]

In doing all this, philosophy is theoretically free to upset as much of popular belief of the persistent kind as it likes. Nor can science find fault with it so long as it keeps to its own sphere, and does not directly contradict any truth which science, by the methods proper to it, is able to establish. Thus, for example, if philosophy finds that there is nothing real independently of mind, science will be satisfied so long as it finds a meaning for its assumed entities, such as space, external things, and physical causes.[153]

The student of philosophy need not be told that these imposing-looking problems respecting cognition, making, up what the Germans call the "Theory of Cognition," and the cognate problem respecting the nature of reality, are still a long way from being settled. To-day, as in the days of Plato and Aristotle, are argued, in slightly altered forms, the vexed questions, What is true cognition? Is it a mere efflux from sensation, a passive conformity of representation to sensation (sensualism or empiricism)? or is it, on the other hand, a construction of active thought, involving certain necessary forms of intelligence (rationalism or intuitivism)?

Again, how are we to shape to ourselves real objective existence? Is it something wholly independent of the mind (realism)? and if so, is this known to be what we—meaning here common people and men of science alike—represent it as being (natural realism), or something different (transfigured realism)? Or is it, on the contrary, something involving mind (idealism)? and if so, is it a strictly phenomenal distinction within our conscious experience (empirical idealism, phenomenalism), or one of the two poles of subject and object constituted by every act of thought (rational idealism)? These are some of the questions in philosophy which still await their final answer.

Philosophy being thus still a question and not a solution, we need not here trouble ourselves about its problems further than to remark on their close connection with our special subject, the study of illusion.

Our brief reference to some of the principal inquiries of philosophy shows that it tends to throw doubt on things which the unreflecting popular mind holds to be indubitable. Different schools of philosophy have shown themselves unequally concerned about these so-called intuitive certainties. In general it may be said that philosophy, though, as I have remarked, theoretically free to set up its own standard of certainty, has in practice endeavoured to give a meaning to, and to find a justification for the assumptions or first principles of science. On the other hand, it has not hesitated, when occasion required, to make very light of the intuitive beliefs of the popular mind as interpreted by itself. Thus, rationalists of the Platonic type have not shrunk from pronouncing individual impressions and objects illusory, an assertion which certainly seems to be opposed to the assumptions of common sense, if not to those of science. On the other hand, the modern empirical or association school is quite ready to declare that the vulgar belief in an external world, so far as it represents this as independent of mind,[154] is an illusion; that the so-called necessary beliefs respecting identity, uniformity, causation, etc., are not, strictly speaking, necessary; and so on. And in these ways it certainly seems to come into conflict with popular convictions, or intuitive certainties, as they present themselves to the unreflecting intelligence.

Philosophy seems, then, to be a continuation of that process of detecting illusion with which science in part concerns itself. Indeed, it is evident that our special study has a very close connection with the philosophic inquiry. What philosophy wants is something intuitively certain as its starting-point, some point d'appui for its construction. The errors incident to the process of reasoning do not greatly trouble it, since these can, in general, be guarded against by the rules of logic. But error in the midst of what, on the face of it, looks like intuitive knowledge naturally raises the question, Is there any kind of absolutely certain cognition, any organ for the accurate perception of truth? And this intimate relation between the scientific and the philosophic consideration of illusion is abundantly illustrated in the history of philosophy. The errors of sense, appearing in a region which to the vulgar seems so indubitable, have again and again set men thinking on the question, "What is the whole range of illusion? Is perception, as popularly understood, after all, a big hallucination? Is our life a dream?"[155]

On the other hand, if our study of the wide range of illusion is fitted to induce that temper of mind which is said to be the beginning of philosophy, that attitude of universal doubt expressed by Descartes in his famous maxim, De omnibus dubitandum, a consideration of the process of correction is fitted to lead the mind on to the determination of the conditions of accurate knowledge. It is evident, indeed, that the very conception of an illusion implies a criterion of certainty: to call a thing illusory, is to judge it by reference to some accepted standard of truth.

The mental processes involved in detecting, resisting, and overcoming illusion, are a very interesting subject for the psychologist, though we have not space here to investigate them fully. Turning to presentative, and more particularly sense-illusions, we find that the detection of an illusion takes place now by an appeal from one sense to another, for example, from sight to touch, by way of verification;[156] now (as in Myer's experiment) by a reference from sense and presentation altogether to representation or remembered experience and a process of reasoning; and now, (as in the illusions of art) conversely, by a transition of mind from what is suggested to the actual sense-impression of the moment. In the sphere of memory, again, illusion is determined, as such, now by attending more carefully to the contents of memory, now by a process of reasoning from some presentative cognition. Finally, errors in our comprehensive general representations of things are known to be such partly by reasoning from other conceptions, and partly by a continual process of reduction of representation to presentation, the general to the particular. I may add that the correction of illusion by an act of reflection and reasoning, which brings the part into consistent relation with the whole of experience, includes throughout the comparison of the individual with the collective or social experience.[157]

We may, perhaps, roughly summarize these operations by saying that they consist in the control of the lower automatic processes (association or suggestion) by the higher activities of conscious will. This activity of will takes the form now of an effort of attention to what is directly present to the mind (sense-impression, internal feeling, mnemonic image, etc.), now of conscious reflection, judgment, and reasoning, by which the error is brought into relation to our experience as a whole, individual and collective.

It is for the philosopher to investigate the inmost nature of these operations as they exhibit themselves in our every-day individual experience, and in the large intellectual movements of history. In no better way can he arrive at what common sense and science regard as certain cognition, at the kinds of knowledge on which they are wont to rely most unhesitatingly.

There is one other relation of our subject to philosophic problems which I have purposely left for final consideration. Our study has consisted mainly in the psychological analysis of illusions supposed to be known or capable of being known as such. Now, the modern association school professes to be able to resolve some of the so-called intuitions of common sense into elements exactly similar to those into which we have here been resolving what are acknowledged by all as illusions. This fact would seem to point to a close connection between the scientific study of illusion and the particular view of these fundamental intuitions taken by one philosophic school. In order to see whether there is really this connection, we must reflect a little further on the nature of the method which we have been pursuing.

I have already had occasion to rise the expression "scientific psychology," or psychology as a positive science, and the meaning of this expression must now be more carefully considered. As a positive science, psychology is limited to the function of analyzing mental states, and of tracing their origin in previous and more simple mental states. It has, strictly speaking, nothing to do with the question of the legitimacy or validity of any mental act.

Take a percept, for example. Psychology can trace its parentage in sensation, the mode in which it has come by its contents in the laws of association. But by common consent, a percept implies a presentative apprehension of an object now present to sense. Is this valid or illusory? This question psychology, as science, does not attempt to answer. It would not, I conceive, answer it even if it were able to make out that the whole mental content in the percept can be traced back to elementary sensations and their combinations. For the fact that in the chemistry of mind elements may combine in perfectly new forms does not disprove that the forms thus arising, whether sentiments or quasi-cognitions, are invalid. Much less can psychology dispute the validity of a percept if it cannot be sure that the mind adds nothing to sensation and its grouping; that in the genesis of the perceptive state, with its intuition of something external and now present as object, nothing like a form of intelligence is superimposed on the elements of sensation, giving to the result of their coalescence the particular unity which we find. Whether psychology as a positive science can ever be sure of this: whether, that is to say, it can answer the question, "How do we come by the idea of object?" without assuming some particular philosophic or extra-scientific theory respecting the ultimate nature of mind, is a point which I purposely leave open.

I would contend, then, that the psychologist, in tracing the genesis of the percept out of previous mental experiences, no more settles the question, What is the object of perception? than the physicist settles it in referring the sense-impression (and so the percept) to a present material agent as its condition.

The same applies to our idea of self. I may discover the concrete experiences which supply the filling in of the idea, and yet not settle the question, Does intelligence add anything in the construction of the form of this idea? and still less settle the question whether there is any real unity answering to the idea.

If this is a correct distinction, if psychology, as science, does not determine questions of validity or objective meaning but only of genesis, if it looks at mental states in relation only to their temporal and causal concomitants and not to their objects, it must follow that our preceding analysis of illusion involves no particular philosophic theory as to the nature of intelligence, but, so far as accurate, consists of scientific facts which all philosophic theories of intelligence must alike be prepared to accept. And I have little doubt that each of the two great opposed doctrines, the intuitive and the associational, would claim to be in a position to take up these facts into its particular theory, and to view them in its own way.

But in addition to this scientific psychology, there is another so-called psychology, which is, strictly speaking, philosophic. This, I need hardly say, is the association philosophy. It proceeds by analyzing certain cognitions and sentiments into their elements, and straightway declaring that they mean nothing more than these. That is to say, the associationist passes from genesis to validity, from the history of a conscious state to its objective meaning. Thus, from showing that an intuitive belief, say that in causation, is not original (in the individual or at least in the race), it goes on to assert that it is not a valid immediate cognition at all. Now, I am not concerned here to inquire into the logical value of this transition, but simply to point out that it is extra-scientific and distinctly philosophic. If logically justifiable, it is so because of some plainly philosophic assumption, as that made by Hume, namely, that all ideas not derived from impressions are to this extent fictitious or illusory.

And now we are in a position to understand the bearing of our scientific analysis of acknowledged illusions on the associationist's treatment of the alleged illusions of common sense. There is no doubt, I think, that some of the so-called intuitions of common sense have points of analogy to acknowledged illusions. For example, the conviction in the act of perception that something external to the mind and independent of it exists, has a certain superficial resemblance to an hallucination of sense; and moreover, the associationist seeks to explain it by means of these very processes which underlie what is recognized by all as sense-illusion.[158] Again, it may be said that our notions of force and of a causal nexus in the physical world imply the idea of conscious energy as known through our muscular sensations, and so have a suspicious resemblance to those anthropomorphic illusions of which I have spoken under Illusions of Insight. Once more, the consciousness of freedom may, as I have suggested, be viewed as analogous in its form and its mode of origin to illusions of introspection. As a last example, it may be said that the mind's certain conviction of the innateness of some of its ideas resembles those illusions of memory which arise through an inability to think ourselves back into a remote past having a type of consciousness widely unlike that of the present.

But now, mark the difference. In our scientific analysis of popularly known illusions, we had something by which to determine the illusory character of the presentation or belief. We had a popularly or scientifically accepted standard of certainty, by a reference to which we might test the particular soi-disant cognition. But in the case of these fundamental beliefs we have no such criterion, except we adopt some particular philosophic theory, say that of the associationist himself. Hence this similarity in structure and origin cannot in itself be said to amount to a proof of equality of logical or objective value. Here again it must be remarked that origin, does not carry validity or invalidity with it.[159]

We thus come back to our starting-point. While there are close relations, psychological and logical, between the scientific study of the ascertained facts of illusion and the philosophic determination of what is illusory in knowledge as a whole, the two domains must be clearly distinguished. On purely scientific ground we cannot answer the question, "How far does illusion extend?" The solution of this question must be handed over to the philosopher, as one aspect of his problem of cognition.

One or two remarks may, perhaps, be hazarded in concluding this account of the relation of the scientific to the philosophic problem of illusion. Science, as we have seen, takes its stand on a stable consensus, a body of commonly accepted belief. And this being so, it would seem to follow, that so far as she is allowed to interest herself in philosophic questions, she will naturally be disposed to ask, What beliefs are shared in by all minds, so far as normal and developed? In other words, she will be inclined to look at universality as the main thing to be determined in the region of philosophic inquiry. The metaphysical sceptic, fond of daring exploits, may break up as many accepted ideas as he likes into illusory dÉbris, provided only he has some bit of reality left to take his stand on. Meanwhile, the scientific mind, here agreeing with the practical mind, will ask, "Will the beliefs thus said to be capable of being shown to be illusory ever cease to exercise their hold on men's minds, including that of the iconoclast himself? Is the mode of demonstration of such a kind as to be likely ever to materially weaken the common-sense 'intuition'?"

This question would seem to be most directly answerable by an appeal to individual testimony. Viewed in this light, it is a question for the present, for some few already allege that in their case philosophic reasonings exercise an appreciable effect on these beliefs. And so far as this is so, the man of scientific temper will feel that there is a question for him.

It is evident, however, that the question of the persistence of these fundamental beliefs is much more one for the future than for the present. The correction of a clearly detected illusion is, as I have more than once remarked, a slow process. An illusion such as the apparent movement of the sun will persist as a partially developed error long after it has been convicted. And it may be that the fundamental beliefs here referred to, even if presumably illusory, are destined to exercise their spell for long ages yet.

Whether this will be the case or not, whether these intuitive beliefs are destined slowly to decay and be dissolved as time rolls on, or whether they will retain an eternal youth, is a question which we of to-day seem, on a first view of the matter, to have no way of answering which does not assume the very point in question—the truth or falsity of the belief. This much may, however, be said. The associationist who resolves these erroneous intuitions into the play of association, admits that the forces at work generating and consolidating the illusory belief are constant and permanent forces, and such as are not likely to be less effective in the future than they have been in the past. Thus, he teaches that the intuition of the single object in the act of perception owes its strength to "inseparable association," according to which law the ideas of the separate "possibilities of sensation," which are all we know of the object, coalesce in the shape of an idea of a single uniting substance. He adds, perhaps, that heredity has tended, and will still tend, to fix the habit of thus transforming an actual multiplicity into an imaginary unity. And in thus arguing, he is allowing that the illusion is one which, to say the least of it, it will always be exceedingly difficult for reason to dislodge.

In view of this uncertainty, and of the possibility, if not the probability, of these beliefs remaining as they have remained, at least approximately universal, the man of science will probably be disposed to hold himself indifferently to the question. He will be inclined to say, "What does it matter whether you call such an apparently permanent belief the correlative of a reality or an illusion? Does it make any practical difference whether a universal 'intuition,' of which we cannot rid ourselves, be described as a uniformly recurring fiction of the imagination, or an integral constitutive factor of intelligence? And, in considering the historical aspect of the question, does it not come to much the same thing whether such permanent mental products be spoken of as the attenuated forms or ghostly survivals of more substantial primitive illusions (for example, anthropomorphic representations of material objects, 'animistic' representations of mind and personality), or as the slowly perfected results of intellectual evolution?"

This attitude of the scientific mind towards philosophic problems will be confirmed when it is seen that those who seek to resolve stable common convictions into illusions are forced, by their very mode of demonstration, to allow these intuitions a measure of validity. Thus, the ideas of the unity and externality attributed to the object in the act of perception are said by the associationist to answer to a matter of fact, namely, the permanent coexistence of certain possibilities of sensation, and the dependence of the single sensations of the individual on the presence of the most permanent of these possibilities, namely, those of the active or muscular and passive sensations of touch, which are, moreover, by far the most constant for all minds. Similarly, the idea of a necessary connection between cause and effect, even if illusory in so far as it expresses an objective necessity, is allowed to be true as an expression of that uniformity of our experience which all scientific progress tends to illustrate more and more distinctly. And even the idea of a permanent self, as distinct from particular fugitive feelings, is admitted by the associationist to be correct in so far as it expresses the fact that mind is "a series of feelings which is aware of itself as past and future." In short, these "illusory intuitions," by the showing of those who affirm them to be illusory, are by no means hallucinations having no real object as their correlative, but merely illusions in the narrow sense, and illusions, moreover, in which the ratio of truth to error seems to be a large one.

It would thus appear that philosophy tends, after all, to unsettle what appear to be permanent convictions of the common mind and the presuppositions of science much less than is sometimes imagined. Our intuitions of external realities, our indestructible belief in the uniformity of nature, in the nexus of cause and effect, and so on, are, by the admission of all philosophers, at least partially and relatively true; that is to say, true in relation to certain features of our common experience. At the worst, they can only be called illusory as slightly misrepresenting the exact results of this experience. And even so, the misrepresentation must, by the very nature of the case, be practically insignificant. And so in full view of the subtleties of philosophic speculation, the man of science may still feel justified in regarding his standard of truth, a stable consensus of belief, as above suspicion.

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an el Bakkeet (a black boy): ‘He is an inch taller for our grandeur; peu s’en faut, he thinks me a great lady and himself a great butler.’ Hassan was a personage in the establishment. One night, on returning from a theatrical party at Dickens’, my mother found the little boy crouching on the doorstep. His master had turned him out of doors because he was threatened with blindness, and having come now and then with messages to Queen Square, he found his way, as he explained, ‘to die on the threshold of the beautiful pale lady.’ His eyes were cured, and he became my mother’s devoted slave and my playmate, to the horror of Mr. Hilliard, the American author. I perfectly recollect how angry I was when he asked how Lady Duff Gordon could let a negro touch her child, whereupon she called us to her, and kissed me first and Hassan afterwards. Some years ago I asked our dear friend Kinglake about my mother and Hassan, and received the following letter: ‘Can I, my dear Janet, how can I trust myself to speak of your dear mother’s beauty in the phase it had reached when first I saw her? The classic form of her features, the noble poise of her head and neck, her stately height, her uncoloured yet pure complexion, caused some of the beholders at first to call her beauty statuesque, and others to call it majestic, some pronouncing it to be even imperious; but she was so intellectual, so keen, so autocratic, sometimes even so impassioned in speech, that nobody feeling her powers could go on feebly comparing her to a statue or a mere Queen or Empress. All this touches only the beauteous surface; the stories (which were told me by your dear mother herself) are incidentally illustrative of her kindness to fellow-creatures in trouble or suffering. Hassan, it is supposed, was a Nubian, and originally, as his name implies, a Mahometan, he came into the possession of English missionaries (who had probably delivered him from slavery), and it resulted that he not only spoke English well and without foreign accent, but was always ready with phrases in use amongst pious Christians, and liked, when he could, to apply them as means of giving honour and glory to his beloved master and mistress; so that if, for example, it happened that, when they were not at home, a visitor called on a Sunday, he was sure to be told by Hassan that Sir Alexander and Lady Duff Gordon were at church, or even—for his diction was equal to this—that they were “attending Divine service.” Your mother had valour enough to practise true Christian kindness under conditions from which the bulk of “good people” might too often shrink; when on hearing that a “Mary” once known to the household had brought herself into trouble by omitting the precaution of marriage, my lady determined to secure the girl a good refuge by taking her as a servant. Before taking this step, however, she assembled the household, declared her resolve to the servants, and ordered that, on pain of instant dismissal, no one of them should ever dare say a single unkind word to Mary. Poor Hassan, small, black as jet, but possessed with an idea of the dignity of his sex, conceived it his duty to become the spokesman of the household, and accordingly, advancing a little in front of the neat-aproned, tall, wholesome maid-servants, he promised in his and their name a full and careful obedience to the mistress’s order, but then, wringing his hands and raising them over his head, he added these words: “What a lesson to us all, my lady.”’ On the birth of a little son Hassan triumphantly announced to all callers: ‘We have got a boy.’ Another of his delightful speeches was made one evening when Prince Louis Napoleon (the late Emperor of the French) dropt in unexpectedly to dinner. ‘Please, my lady,’ said he, on announcing that dinner was ready, ‘I ran out and bought two pen’orth of sprats for the honour of the house.’

Though I was only six I distinctly remember the Chartist riots in 1848. William Bridges Adams, the engineer, an old friend of my great-uncle, Philip Taylor, had a workshop at Bow, and my mother helped to start a library for the men, and sometimes attended meetings and discussed politics with them. They adored her, and when people talked of possible danger she would smile and say: ‘My men will look after me.’ On the evening of April 9 a large party of stalwart men in fustian jackets arrived at our house and had supper; Tom Taylor made speeches and proposed toasts which were cheered to the echo, and at last my mother made a speech too, and wound up by calling the men her ‘Gordon volunteers.’ The ‘Hip, hip, hurrah!’ with which it was greeted startled the neighbours, who for a moment thought the Chartists had invaded the quiet precincts of the square.

To Mrs. Austin, who was then in Paris, her daughter wrote, on April 10:

Dearest Mutter,

‘I had only time to write once yesterday, as all hands were full of bustle in entertaining our guests. I never wish to see forty better gentlemen than we had here last night. As all was quiet, we had supper—cold beef, bread and beer—with songs, sentiments and toasts, such as “Success to the roof we are under,” “Liberty, brotherhood and order.” Then they bivouacked in the different houses till five this morning, when they started home. Among the party was a stray policeman, who looked rather wonder-struck. Tom Taylor was capital, made short speeches, told stories, and kept all in high good-humour; and Alick came home from patrolling as a special constable, and was received with great glee and affection. All agreed that the fright, to us at least, was well made up by the kindly and pleasant evening. As no one would take a penny, we shall send books to the library, or a contribution to the school, all our neighbours being quite anxious to pay, though not willing to fraternise. I shall send cravats as a badge to the “Gordon volunteers.”

‘I enclose a letter from Eothen [Kinglake] about Paris, which will interest you. My friends of yesterday unanimously decided that Louis Blanc would “just suit the ‘lazy set.’”

‘We had one row, which, however, ceased on the appearance of our stalwart troop; indeed, I think one Birmingham smith, a handsome fellow six feet high, whose vehement disinterestedness would neither allow to eat, drink, or sleep in the house, would have scattered them.’

Mr. and Mrs. Austin established themselves at Weybridge in a low, rambling cottage, and we spent some summers with them. The house was cold and damp, and our dear Hassan died in 1850 from congestion of the lungs. I always attributed my mother’s bad health to the incessant colds she caught there. I can see before me now her beautiful pale face bending over poor Hassan as she applied leeches to his chest, which a new maid refused to do, saying, with a toss of her head, ‘Lor! my lady, I couldn’t touch either of ’em!’ The flash of scorn with which she regarded the girl softened into deep affection and pity when she looked down on her faithful Nubian servant.

In 1851 my father took a house at Esher, which was known as ‘The Gordon Arms,’ and much frequented by our friends. In a letter, written about that time to C. J. Bayley, then secretary to the Governor of the Mauritius, Lady Duff Gordon gives the first note of alarm as to her health: ‘I fear you would think me very much altered since my illness; I look thin, ill, and old, and my hair is growing gray. This I consider hard upon a woman just over her thirtieth birthday. I continue to like Esher very much; I don’t think we could have placed ourselves better. Kinglake has given Alick a great handsome chestnut mare, so he is well mounted, and we ride merrily. I expressed such exultation at the idea of your return that my friends, all but Alick, refused to sympathize. Philips, Millais, and Dicky Doyle talked of jealousy, and Tom Taylor muttered something about a “hated rival.” Meanwhile, all send friendly greetings to you.’

One summer Macaulay was often at Esher, his brother-in-law having taken a house near ours. He shared my mother’s admiration for Miss Austen’s novels, and they used to talk of her personages as though they were living friends. If, perchance, my grandfather Austin was there, the talk grew indeed fast and furious, as all three were vehement, eloquent, and enthusiastic talkers.

When my mother went to Paris in the summer of 1857 she saw Heine again. As she entered the room he exclaimed ‘Oh! Lucie has still the great brown eyes!’ He remembered every little incident and all the people who had been in the inn at Boulogne. ‘I, for my part, could hardly speak to him,’ my mother wrote to Lord Houghton, who asked her to give him some recollections of the poet for his ‘Monographs,’ ‘so shocked was I by his appearance. He lay on a pile of mattresses, his body wasted so that it seemed no bigger than a child’s under the sheet that covered him, the eyes closed and the face altogether like the most painful and wasted Ecce Homo ever painted by some old German painter. His voice was very weak, and I was astonished at the animation with which he talked; evidently his mind had wholly survived his body.’ He wished to give my mother the copyright of all his works, made out lists how to arrange them, and gave her carte-blanche to cut out what she pleased, and was especially eager that she should do a prose translation of his songs against her opinion of its practicability. To please him she translated ‘Almanzor’ and several short poems into verse—the best translations I know.

After trying Ventnor for two winters, my mother went out to the Cape of Good Hope in a sailing vessel, but on her return was unfortunately persuaded to go to Eaux Bonnes in the autumn of 1862, which did her great harm. Thence she went to Egypt, where the dry hot climate seemed to arrest the malady for a short time. The following memoir written by Mrs. Norton in the Times gives a better picture of her than could any words of mine, the two talented and beautiful women were intimate friends, and few mourned more deeply for Lucie Duff Gordon than Caroline Norton:

‘“In Memoriam.” The brief phrase whose solemnity prefaced millions of common place epitaphs before Tennyson taught grief to speak, lamenting his dead friend in every phase and variety of regret. With such gradation and difference of sorrow will the recent death of a very remarkable woman, Lucie, Lady Duff Gordon, be mourned for by all who knew her, and with such a sense of blank loss will they long continue to lament one whose public success as an author was only commensurate with the charm of her private companionship. Inheriting from both parents the intellectual faculties which she so nobly exercised, her work has been ended in the very noontide of life by premature failure of health; and the long exile she endured for the sake of a better climate has failed to arrest, though it delayed, the doom foretold by her physicians. To that exile we owe the most popular, perhaps, of her contributions to the literature of her country, “Letters from the Cape,” and “Letters from Egypt,” the latter more especially interesting from the vivid, life-like descriptions of the people among whom she dwelt, her aspirations for their better destiny, and the complete amalgamation of her own pursuits and interests with theirs. She was a settler, not a traveller among them. Unlike Lady Hester Stanhope, whose fantastic and half-insane notions of rulership and superiority have been so often recorded for our amazement, Lady Duff Gordon kept the simple frankness of heart and desire to be of service to her fellow-creatures without a thought of self or a taint of vanity in her intercourse with them. Not for lack of flattery or of real enthusiastic gratitude on their part. It is known that when at Thebes, on more than one of her journeys, the women raised the “cry of joy” as she passed along, and the people flung branches and raiment on her path, as in the old Biblical descriptions of Eastern life. The source of her popularity was in the liberal kindliness of spirit with which she acted on all occasions, more especially towards those she considered the victims of bad government and oppressive laws. She says of herself: “one’s pity becomes a perfect passion when one sits among the people as I do, and sees all they endure. Least of all can I forgive those among Europeans and Christians who can help to break these bruised reeds.” And again: “Would that I could excite the interest of my country in their suffering! Some conception of the value of public opinion in England has penetrated even here.” Sympathizing, helping, doctoring their sick, teaching their children, learning the language, Lady Duff Gordon lived in Egypt, and in Egypt she has died, leaving a memory of her greatness and goodness such as no other European woman ever acquired in that country. It is touching to trace her lingering hopes of life and amended health in her letters to her husband and her mother, and to see how, as they faded out, there rose over those hopes the grander light of fortitude and submission to the will of God.

‘Gradually—how gradually the limits of this notice forbid us to follow—hope departs, and she begins bravely to face the inevitable destiny. And then comes the end of all, the strong yet tender announcement of her own conviction that there would be no more meetings, but a grave opened to receive her in a foreign land.

‘“Dearest Alick,

‘“Do not think of coming here, as you dread the climate. Indeed, it would be almost too painful to me to part from you again; and as it is, I can wait patiently for the end, among people who are kind and loving enough to be comfortable without too much feeling of the pain of parting. The leaving Luxor was rather a distressing scene, as they did not think to see me again. The kindness of all the people was really touching, from the Cadi, who made ready my tomb among his own family, to the poorest fellaheen.”

‘Such are the tranquil and kindly words with which she prefaces her death. Those who remember her in her youth and beauty, before disease rather than time had altered the pale heroic face, and bowed the slight, stately figure, may well perceive some strange analogy between soul and body in the Spartan firmness which enabled her to pen that last farewell so quietly.

‘But to the last her thought was for others, and for the services she could render. In this very letter, written, as it were, on the verge of the tomb, she speaks with gratitude and gladness of the advancement of her favourite attendant, Omar. This Omar had been recommended to her by the janissary of the American Consul-General, and so far back as 1862, when in Alexandria, she mentions having engaged him, and his hopeful prophecy of the good her Nile life is to do her. “My cough is bad; but Omar says I shall lose it and ‘eat plenty’ as soon as I see a crocodile.”

‘Omar “could not leave her,” and he had his reward. One of the last events in the life of this gifted and liberal-minded Englishwoman was the visit to her dahabeeyeh, or Nile boat, of the Prince and Princess of Wales. Then poor Omar’s simple and faithful service to his dying mistress was rewarded in a way he could scarcely have dreamt; and Lady Duff Gordon thus relates the incident: “Omar sends you his heartfelt thanks, and begs the boat may remain registered at the Consulate in your name, as a protection, for his use and benefit. The Prince has appointed him his dragoman, but he is sad enough, poor fellow! all his prosperity does not console him for the loss of “the mother he found in the world.” Mahomed at Luxor wept bitterly, and said: “Poor I—poor my children—poor all the people!” and kissed my hand passionately; and the people at Esneh asked leave to touch me “for a blessing,” and everyone sent delicate bread and their best butter and vegetables and lambs. They are kinder than ever now that I can no longer be of any use to them. If I live till September I will go up to Esneh, where the air is softest and I cough less; I would rather die among my own people on the Saeed than here. Can you thank the Prince for Omar, or shall I write? He was most pleasant and kind, and the Princess too; she is the most perfectly simple-mannered girl I ever saw; she does not even try to be civil like other great people, but asks blunt questions and looks at one so heartily with her clear, honest eyes, that she must win all hearts. They were more considerate than any people I have seen, and the Prince, instead of being gracious, was, if I may say so, quite respectful in manner: he is very well bred and pleasant, and has, too, the honest eyes that make one sure he has a kind heart. My sailors were so proud at having the honour of rowing him in our own boat and of singing to him. I had a very good singer in the boat.”

‘Long will her presence be remembered and wept for among the half-civilized friends of her exile, the poor, the sick, the needy and the oppressed. She makes the gentle, half-playful boast in one of her letters from the Nile that she is “very popular,” and has made many cures as a Hakeem, or doctor, and that a Circassian had sat up with a dying Englishman because she had nursed his wife.

‘The picture of the Circassian sitting up with the dying Englishman because an English lady had nursed his wife is infinitely touching, and had its parallel in the speech of an old Scottish landlady known to the writer of this notice, whose son had died in the West Indies among strangers. “And they were so good to him,” said she, “that I vowed if ever I had a lodger sick I would do my best for that stranger in remembrance.” In remembrance! Who shall say what seeds of kindly intercommunion that dying Englishwoman of whom and of whose works we have been speaking may have planted in the arid Eastern soil? Or what “bread she may have cast” on those Nile waters, “which shall be found again after many days”? “Out of evil cometh good,” and certainly out of her sickness and suffering good came to all within her influence.

‘Lady Duff Gordon’s printed works were many. She was an excellent German scholar, and had the advantage in her translations from that difficult language of her labours being shared by her husband. Ranke, Niebuhr, Feuerbach, Moltke, and others, owe their introduction to our English-reading public to the industry and talent of her pen. She was also a classic scholar of no mean pretensions. Perhaps no woman of our own time, except Mrs. Somerville and Mrs. Browning in their very different styles, combined so much erudition with so much natural ability. She was the daughter of Mr. Austin, the well-known professor of jurisprudence, and his gifted wife, Sarah Austin, whose name is familiar to thousands of readers, and whose social brilliancy is yet remembered with extreme admiration and regret by the generation immediately preceding our own.

‘That Lucie, Lady Duff Gordon, inherited the best of the intellect and qualities of both these parents will, we think, hardly be disputed, and she had besides, of her own, a certain generosity of spirit, a widespread sympathy for humanity in general, without narrowness or sectarianism, which might well prove her faith modelled on the sentence which appeals too often in vain from the last page of the printed Bible to resenting and dissenting religionists, “MultÆ terricolis linguÆ, coelestibus una.”’

The last two years of my mother’s life were one long struggle against deadly disease. The last winter was cheered by the presence of my brother, but at her express desire he came home in early summer to continue his studies, and my father and I were going out to see her, when the news came of her death at Cairo on July 14, 1869. Her desire had been to be among her ‘own people’ at Thebes, but when she felt she would never see Luxor again, she gave orders to be buried as quietly as possible in the cemetery at Cairo. The memory of her talent, simplicity, stately beauty, and extraordinary eloquence, and her almost passionate pity for any oppressed creature, will not easily fade. She bore great pain, and what was almost a greater trial, absence from her husband, her little daughter Urania, and her many friends, uncomplainingly, gleaning what consolation she could by helping her poor Arab neighbours, who adored her, and have not, I am told, forgotten the ‘Great Lady’ who was so good to them.

The first volume of Lady Duff Gordon’s ‘Letters from Egypt’ was published by Messrs. Macmillan and Co. in May, 1865, with a preface by her mother, Mrs. Austin, who edited them, and was obliged to omit much that might have given offence and made my mother’s life uncomfortable—to say the least—in Egypt. Before the end of the year the book went through three editions.

In 1875 a volume containing the ‘Last Letters from Egypt,’ to which were added ‘Letters from the Cape,’ reprinted from ‘Vacation Tourists’ (1864), with a Memoir of my mother by myself, was published by Messrs. Macmillan and Co. A second edition appeared in 1876.

I have now copied my mother’s letters as they were written, omitting only the purely family matter which is of no interest to the public. Edward Lear’s drawing of Luxor was printed in ‘Three Generations of Englishwomen,’ edited by Mrs. Ross, but the other illustrations are now reproduced for the first time.

The names of villages alluded to in the ‘Letters’ have been spelt as in the Atlas published by the Egyptian Exploration Fund.

janet ross.