cesses of reasoning.

Such persons accept as undoubted anything that their senses report to
them. They consider it heresy to question a report of the senses. One of
their favorite remarks is that "it almost makes me doubt my senses." They
fail to perceive that their senses, at the best, are very imperfect
instruments, and that the mind is constantly employed in correcting the
mistaken report of the ordinary five senses.

Not to speak of the common phenomenon of color-blindness, in which one
color seems to be another, our senses are far from being exact. We may,
by suggestion, be made to imagine that we smell or taste certain things
which do not exist, and hypnotic subjects may be caused to see things that
have no existence save in the imagination of the person. The familiar
experiment of the person crossing his first two fingers, and placing them
on a small object, such as a pea or the top of a lead-pencil, shows us how
"mixed" the sense of feeling becomes at times. The many familiar instances
of optical delusions show us that even our sharp eyes may deceive
us--every conjuror knows how easy it is to deceive the eye by suggestion
and false movements.

Perhaps the most familiar example of mistaken sense-reports is that of the
movement of the earth. The senses of every person report to him that the
earth is a fixed, immovable body, and that the sun, moon, planets, and
stars move around the earth every twenty-four hours. It is only when one
accepts the reports of the reasoning faculties, that he knows that the
earth not only whirls around on its axis every twenty-four hours, but that
it circles around the sun every three hundred and sixty-five days; and
that even the sun itself, carrying with it the earth and the other
planets, really moves along in space, moving toward or around some unknown
point far distant from it. If there is any one particular report of the
senses which would seem to be beyond doubt or question, it certainly would
be this elementary sense report of the fixedness of the earth beneath our
feet, and the movements of the heavenly bodies around it--and yet we know
that this is merely an illusion, and that the facts of the case are
totally different. Again, how few persons really realize that the eye
perceives things up-side-down, and that the mind only gradually acquires
the trick of adjusting the impression?

I am not trying to make any of you doubt the report of his or her five
senses. That would be