(Continued from page 62.)
“Who has authorised you to try me?”
“Who has authorised me to save you from the waves?”
“Why this question instead of an answer?”
“To tell you that every body is authorised to be useful to another person, without his knowledge and permission.”
“I hope you will not make me believe that you have deceived me in order to promote my happiness!”
“If delusions are leading to truth, then they are undoubtedly means of promoting happiness.”
“Indeed! According to my notions, real happiness never can be founded upon delusion, as truth can never originate from error. Delusions and errors are obstacles on the road to happiness and truth, but never will be the means of promoting them.”
“Then you must blame nature for acting after a plan entirely opposite to your notions. Has she not made imagination, that mother of illusion, the source of unspeakable pleasures. It is imagination alone that can afford what reality never can give---never satiated enjoyment. Imagination preserves, renews and improves every pleasure of the senses—What else but imagination is the source of the purest and most sublime raptures of love? Or do you perhaps think, that the perceptions which we receive through our senses are free of illusion, that we are never deceived by the organs which nature has given us? Your ideas would be just if we could know by means of our senses, the objects themselves and not merely their appearances; the essential substance, and not merely the superficies of things; however, as our senses never shew us the thing itself, but only its exterior appearance, the reality of sensible perceptions is always very suspicious. And since, from our sensible perceptions, even our plainest notions are abstracted, one must either doubt the certainly of logical arguments, or allow that illusions are the path leading to truth. Common experience teaches us, that one improves in knowledge by committing errors. It is as incontrovertible that error precedes truth, as it cannot be denied that darkness precedes light. If therefore nature herself leads a man to truth and happiness by way of delusions and errors, then you cannot blame me for having endeavoured to lead you to that mark by the same road.”
“But to what sort of happiness and truth? for no real happiness, and no pure truth can exist if all our perceptions and notions are founded on illusions.”