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it would not make any such difference, as I suppose it
would not, why not allow us the harmless convenience
of believing in these fictions, if they be
fictions? Decidedly we must be allowed
these ideas, if only as cement for the matter of our
sensations. At the same time, I protest that such
permission would not be at all enough. Comte,
Poincaré, and Carl Pearson, take what they consider
to be the first impressions of sense, but which
are really nothing of the sort, but are percepts
that are products of psychical operations, and they
separate these from all the intellectual part
of our knowledge, and arbitrarily call the
first real and the second fictions. These
two words real and fictive bear no significations