Ernest Jones has remarked on the 'astonishing contrast between the diversity of philosophical opinions and the widespread agreement in scientific work .. .'1, and said, in part explanation of this state of affairs, that philosophical questions 'have more important subjective origins than had hitherto been discernible'.l There can no longer be any serious doubt that philosophical questions and theories have unconscious determinants, that they have meanings which are hidden from the philosophers themselves and are not available to their conscious reasoning processes. This goes some way toward explaining the astonishing absence of assured results in philosophy. But it cannot be the whole explanation. It does not naturally occur to anyone to question the appearance of a kind of scientific work going on in philosophy, a kind of work in which, for example, hypotheses are constructed to explain various phenomena and evidence is brought forward in support of the hypotheses. But it may be that an important part of the explanation of the contrast between philosophy and science is to be arrived at only through the question as to whether philosophy is a kind of science and whether it actually is about the phenomena it professes to investigate. In fact there exist reasons for thinking that philosophy has the substance of a verbally contrived intellectual mirage and that it is a subject which only in outward appearance seeks to discover truths about things. Psychoanalysis has a special interest in the illusions of

mankind, and what it can learn from philosophers is the linguistic mechanics by which striking and durable illusions are produced. What philosophers have to learn from psychoanalysis are the reasons why the illusions have such overriding importance for them.