Popular Lectures on Zoonomia: Or The Laws of Animal Life, in Health and DiseaseGarnett, Thomas
Science
Popular Lectures on Zoonomia: Or The Laws of Animal Life, in Health and Disease
Garnett, Thomas
Physiology
There are many things necessary to perfect sensation, besides those
that have been mentioned. The degree and perfection of sensation will
depend much on the mind, and will be continually altered by delirium,
torpor, sleep, and other circumstances; much likewise depends on the
state of the organs with respect to preceding impressions; for if any
organ of sense have been subjected to a strong impression, it will
become nearly insensible of those which are weaker.
Of this innumerable instances may be given: an eye which has been
subjected to a strong light, becomes insensible of a weaker: and on
the contrary, if the organs of sense have been deprived of their
accustomed impressions for some time, they are affected by very
slight ones. Hence it is, that when a person goes from daylight into
a darkened room, he can at first see nothing; by degrees however he
begins to have an imperfect perception of the different objects, and
if he remain long enough, he will see them with tolerable
distinctness, though the quantity of light be the same as when he
entered the room, when they were invisible to him.
Sensation often arises from internal causes, without any external
impulse. To this source may be referred consciousness, memory,
imagination, volition, and other affections of the mind. These are
called the internal senses. The senses, whether internal or external,
have never been accurately reduced to classes, orders, or genera; the
external indeed are generally referred to five orders; namely,
seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and feeling, or touch. With
respect to the four first, the few qualities of external bodies which
each perceives may be easily reduced to classes, each of which may be
referred to its peculiar organ of sensation, because each organ is so
constituted, that it can only be affected by one class of properties;
thus the eye can only be affected by light; the ear by the vibrations
of the air, and so of the rest.
The same organ, whatever be its state, or whatever be the degree of
impulse, always gives to the mind a similar sensation; nor is it
possible, by any means we are acquainted with, to communicate the
sensation peculiar to one organ by means of another. Thus we are
incapable, for instance, of hearing with our eyes, and seeing with
our ears: nor have we any reason to believe that similar impressions
produce dissimilar sensations in different people. The pleasure,
however, as well as the pain and disgust, accompanying different
sensations, differ very greatly in different persons, and even in the
same person at different times; for the sensations which sometimes
afford us pleasure, at other times produce disgust.
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