virgin issue of a simple writ of oblivion.

At the time when critical reflection begins, we have already been long
engaged in action and science, by the training of individual life, as by
hereditary and racial experience, our faculties of perception and
conception, our senses and our understanding, have contracted habits, which
are by this time unconscious and instinctive; we are haunted by all kinds
of ideas and principles, so familiar today that they even pass unobserved.
But what is it all worth?

Does it, in its present state, help us to know the nature of a
disinterested intuition?

Nothing but a methodical examination of consciousness can tell us that; and
it will take more than a renunciation of explicit knowledge to recreate in
us a new mind, capable of grasping the bare fact exactly as it is: what we
require is perhaps a penetrating reform, a kind of conversion.

The rational and perceptive function we term our intelligence emerges from
darkness through a slowly lifting dawn. During this twilight period it has
lived, worked, acted, fashioned and informed itself. On the threshold of
philosophical speculation it is full of more or less concealed beliefs,
which are literally prejudices, and branded with a secret mark influencing
its every movement. Here is an actual situation. Exemption from it is
beyond anyone's province. Whether we will or no, we are from the beginning
of our inquiry immersed in a doctrine which disguises nature to us, and
already at bottom constitutes a complete metaphysic. This we term common-
sense, and positive science is itself only an extension and refinement of
it. What is the value of this work performed without clear consciousness
or critical attention? Does it bring us into true relation with things,