In the second place, it may be said that the contrast between the inner and the outer experience is much less than it seems. In many cases our emotions are the direct result of a common external cause, and even when they are not thus attached to some present external circumstance, we are able, it is admitted, by the use of language, roughly to compare our individual feelings. And such comparison is continually bringing to light the fact that there is a continuity in our mental structure, that our highest thoughts and emotions lead us back to our common sense-impressions, and that consequently, in spite of all individual differences of temperament and mental organization, our inner experience is in all its larger features a common experience. I may add that this supposition of the common nature of our internal experience, as a whole, not only underlies the science of psychology, but is implied in the very process of detecting and correcting errors of introspection. I do not mean that in matters of feeling "authority" is to override "private judgment." Our last resort with respect to things of the mind is, as I have said, that of careful self-inspection. And the progress of psychology and the correction of illusion proceed by means of an ever-improving exercise of the introspective faculty. Yet such individual inspection can at least be _guided_ by the results of others' similar inspection, and should be so guided as soon as a general consensus in matters of internal experience is fairly made out. In point of fact, the preceding discussion of illusions of introspection has plainly rested on the sufficiently verified assumption that the calmest and most efficient kind of introspection, in bringing to light what is permanent as compared with what is variable in the individual cognition, points in the direction of a common body of introspected fact. CHAPTER IX. OTHER QUASI-PRESENTATIVE ILLUSIONS: ERRORS OF INSIGHT. Besides the perception of external objects, and the inspection of our internal mental states, there are other forms of quasi-presentative cognition which need to be touched on here, inasmuch as they are sometimes erroneous and illusory. In the last chapter I alluded to the fact that emotion may arise as the immediate accompaniment of a sense-impression. When this is the case there is a disposition to read into the external object a quality answering to the emotion, just as there is a disposition to ascribe to objects qualities of heat and cold answering to the sensations thus called. And such a reference of an emotional result to an external exciting cause approximates in character to an immediate intuition. The cognition of the quality is instantaneous, and quite free from any admixture of conscious inference. Accordingly, we have to inquire into the illusory forms of such intuition, if such there be. _AEsthetic Intuition._