If the thing in the grass, instead of a thorn, happened to be a snake,
and you heard it rustle, then the warning message would come through
your ears to the brain, and you would jump just the same; though, as it
is not so easy to tell by a hearing message exactly where the sound is
coming from, you might possibly jump in the wrong direction and land on
top of the danger.
This is the way in which you see, hear, and form ideas of things. Your
eye telegraphs to the brain the colors; your ear, the sounds; and your
nose, the smells of the particular object; and then your brain puts
these all together and compares them with its records of things that it
has seen before, which looked, or sounded, or smelt like that, and
decides what it is; and you say you _see_ an apple, or you _hear_ a
rooster crow, or you _smell_ pies baking. Remember that, strange as it
may seem, you don't see an orange, for instance, but only a circular
patch of yellowness, which, when you had seen it before, and felt of it
with your hand, you found to be associated with a feeling of roundness
and solidness; and when you lifted it toward your nose, with the
well-known smell of orange-peel; so you called it an orange. If the
yellow patch were hard, instead of elastic, to the touch, and didn't
have any aromatic smell when you brought it up to your nose, you would
probably say it was a gourd, or an apple, or perhaps a yellow croquet
ball. This is the way in which, we say, our senses may "deceive" us, and
is one of the reasons why three different people who have seen something
happen will often differ so much in their accounts of it.
It is not so much that our senses deceive us, but that we draw the wrong
conclusions from the sights, sounds, and smells that they report to our
brains, usually from being in too great a hurry and not looking
carefully enough, or not waiting to check up what we _see_ by touching,
hearing, or tasting the thing that we look at.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account