synthesis, which no function of that sense, and no knowledge imparted to
us by it, (and, according to the supposition, we have, as yet, no other
knowledge,) can enable us to discriminate or dissolve. Where the seeing
is, there is the thing seen, and where the thing seen is, there is the
seeing of it.
But man is not a mere seeing animal. He has other senses besides: He
has, for example, the sense of touch, and one of the most important
offices which this sense performs, is to break up the identity or
cohesion which subsists between sight and its objects. And how? We
answer, by teaching us to associate _vision in general_, or the abstract
_condition_ regulating our visual impressions, with the presence of the
small tangible body we call the eye, and _vision in particular_, or the
individual sensations of vision, (i.e. colours,) with the presence of
immeasurably larger bodies revealed to us by touch, and tangibly
external to the tangible eye. Sight, as we have said, does not inform us
that its sensations are situated in the eye: it does not inform us that
we have an eye at all. Neither does touch inform us that our visual
sensations are located in the eye. It does not lead us to associate with
the eye any of the visual phenomena or operations _in the first
instance_. If it did, it would (_firstly_) either be impossible for it
_afterwards_ to induce us to associate them with the presence of
tangible bodies distant and different from the eye: or, (_secondly_),
such an association would merely give birth to the abstract knowledge or
conclusion, that these bodies were in one place, while the sensations
suggesting them were felt to be associated with something in another
place; colour would not be seen--as it is--incarnated with body: or,
(_thirdly_), we should be compelled to postulate for the eye, as many
philosophers have done, in our opinion, most unwarrantably, "a faculty
of projection"[37] by which it might dissolve the association between
itself and its sensations, throwing off the latter in the form of
colours over the surface of things, and reversing the old Epicurean
doctrine that perception is kept up by the transit to the sensorium of
the ghosts or _simulacra_ of things,
Quæ, quasi membranæ, summo de corpore rerum,
Direptæ, volitant ultro citroque per auras.[38]
It is difficult to say whether the hypothesis of "cast-off films" is
more absurd when we make the films come from things to us as spectral
effluxes, or go from us to them in the semblance of colours.
[37] We observe that even Müller speaks of the "faculty of
projection" as if he sanctioned and adopted the hypothesis.--See
_Physiology_, vol. ii. p. 1167.
[38] Lucretius.
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