We "couldn't progress before science" but developed metallurgy, mining, sailing, astronomy, democracy, ... well before the enlightenment and the development of the scientific method? Heck, we domesticated plants and animals before recorded history.
Perhaps you're talking about empiricism rather than science? Empiricism is old as the hills, presumably these discoveries were made from observation and experimentation. The scientific method builds on empiricism, but incorporates mechanisms to make it more difficult to fool ourselves (such as reproducibility and peer review), and so is distinct.
As for "seeing beauty where there is none," that's nonsense. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. If you see it, it's real. You can critique someone else's ideas of beauty, you can disagree with them, but to say that they are somehow objectively wrong is just chauvinism.
You may as well tell someone that when they're thinking, it's just the illusion of thinking. Or when they're enjoying a meal you dislike, they're only imagining that they're enjoying it. What would that even mean?
I think it’s more appropriate to say that self-deception is a consequence of overfitting based on other primal instincts. Our #1 skill lies in pattern recognition and imitation. A lot of time, it’s faulty because it’s guided by fear/anxiety for perfectly valid reasons of survival.
