Such things as actual illusion, actual error, science may nowise recognize, for in so doing she would be recognizing something for which there is absolutely no room in her cosmogony. One would thereby introduce functions for which one could furnish no organized basis. Only in the cosmogony of the Buddha, only in the concept of individual beginninglessness does each find its necessary place. Here they are the necessary preconditions of all existence. Science is powerless to defend herself against them otherwise than by an attempt to “explain away” such occurrences out of the order of world-events. Upon this point E. Mach, in his _Analyse der Empfindungen_, expresses himself as follows: “The phrase, ‘illusion of the senses,’ shows that man has not yet rightly come to a consciousness, or at least has not yet found it necessary to express such consciousness in fitting terminology, that the senses indicate neither false nor true. The only ‘true’ of which one can speak in connection with the sense organs is that under different conditions they yield different sensations and perceptions. Since these conditions are so extremely manifold in their variety ... it may very well seem ... as if the organ acts dissimilarly under similar conditions. Results out of the usual order are what men are accustomed to call illusions.” This is to make illusion merely truth in an infinitesimal form, to “read” it as a special form of truth, and so be rid of it. But the value of the Buddha-thought in this domain does not end here. Over and above, it explains to begin with, the every-day fact of experience, that not every pairing evolves a new embryo. This fact is alike incapable of explanation whether from the standpoint of faith or from that of science. Faith, which sees a divine soul breathed into the material of generation, permits of no standpoint at all, since for it everything takes place according to God’s good pleasure. From the standpoint of science, however, with every conjunction of ovum and sperm-cell, conception also must be granted, since here both are already the form of the new life, already contain in themselves all the ingredients of this new life. It is only the Buddha-thought that explains why, meanwhile, despite the union of ovum and sperm, conception does not take place: it has not “struck in.” At the moment when both were open to the inflow of the energy, the latter was not ready. In the ceaseless, unbroken attunement, each to the other, of the happenings of a world, the proper moment was let slip.[25]