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?"