2. _The Mind Dispelling Optical Illusions._--Actual perception of
spatial properties is accompanied by movements corresponding to its
character. In the case of optical illusions, with the so-called false
perceptions eye-movements are closely related. But though the perceived
object and its environment remain constant, the sufficiently powerful
mind can, as we say, dispel these illusions, the perception itself being
creatively changed. Photo-graphs taken at intervals during the presence
of these optical illusions, during the change, perhaps gradual and
unconscious, in the perception, and after these illusions have, as the
phrase is, finally disappeared, show quite clearly that changes in
eye-movements corresponding to those internally created in perception
itself successively occur. What is called accuracy of movement is
created by what is called correctness of perception. The higher creation
in the perception is the determining cause of an improvement, a
precision in the motion. Thus we see correct perception in the
individual helping to make that cerebral organization and accurate motor
adjustment on which its possibility and permanence seem in so far to
depend. So-called correct perception is connected with a long-continued
process of perceptual education motived and initiated from within. How
this may take place is here illustrated at length by our author.
3. _Euclid not Necessary._--Geometry is a construction of the intellect,
in application not certain but convenient. As Schiller says, when we see
these facts as clearly as the development of metageometry has compelled
us to see them, we must surely confess that the Kantian account of space
is hopelessly and demonstrably antiquated. As Royce says in 'Kant's
Doctrine of the Basis of Mathematics,' "That very use of intuition which
Kant regarded as geometrically ideal, the modern geometer regards as
scientifically defective, because surreptitious. No mathematical
exactness without explicit proof from assumed principles--such is the
motto of the modern geometer. But suppose the reasoning of Euclid
purified of this comparatively surreptitious appeal to intuition.
Suppose that the principles of geometry are made quite explicit at the
outset of the treatise, as Pieri and Hilbert or Professor Halsted or Dr.
Veblen makes his principles explicit in his recent treatment of
geometry. Then, indeed, geometry becomes for the modern mathematician a
purely rational science. But very few students of the logic of
mathematics at the present time can see any warrant in the analysis of
geometrical truth for regarding just the Euclidean system of principles
as possessing any discoverable necessity." Yet the environmental and
perhaps hereditary premiums on Euclid still make even the scientist
think Euclid most convenient.
4. _Without Hypotheses, no Science._--Nobody ever observed an
equidistantial, but also nobody ever observed a straight line.
Emerson's Uriel
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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