45. “I see an elephant.” In other words, I am affected in a certain way, and interpret my affection by previous similar experiences, expressing these in verbal symbols. But I want an explanation, and this the philosopher vouchsafes to me by translating my affection into his terms. He takes me into another sphere--tells me of an undulating Ether, the waves of which beat upon my retina--of lines of Light refracted by media and converged by lenses according to geometric laws--of the formation thereby of a tiny image of the gigantic elephant on my retina as on the plate of a camera-obscura--this, and much more, is what _he_ sees in _my_ visual feeling, and he bids me see it also. Grateful for the novel instruction, I am compelled to say that it does not alter my vision of the elephant, does not make the fact a whit clearer, does not indeed correspond with what I feel. It is outside knowledge, valuable, as all knowledge is, but supplementary. It is translation into another language. And when I come to examine the translation, I find it very imperfect. I ask my instructor: Is it the tiny image on my retina which I see, and not the big elephant on the grass? And how do I see this retinal image, which you explain to be upside down?--how is it carried from my retina to my mind? I have no consciousness of tiny reversed image, none of my retina, only of a fact of feeling, which I call “seeing an elephant.” The camera-obscura has no such feeling--it reflects the image, it does not see the object. Here my instructor, having reached the limit of his science,[210] hands me over to the physiologist, who will translate the fact for me in terms not of Geometry, but of Anatomy and Physiology. The laws of Dioptrics cease at this point: the image they help to form on the retina is ruthlessly dispersed, and all its beautiful geometric construction is lost in a neural excitation, which is transmitted through semifluid channels of an optic tract to a semifluid ganglion, whence a thrill is shot through the whole brain, and is there _transformed_ into a visual sensation. Again I fancy I have gained novel instruction of a valuable kind; but it does not affect my original experience that I am enabled to translate it into different terms; the less so because I cannot help the conviction that the translation is imperfect, leaving out the essential points. If a phrase be translated for me into French or German, I gain thereby an addition to my linguistic knowledge, but the experience thus variously expressed remains unaffected. When the fact is expressed in geometrical or physiological terms, the _psychical process_ finds no adequate expression. Neither in the details, nor in the totals, do I recognize any of the qualities of my state of feeling in seeing the elephant. I do not see the geometrical process, I do not see the anatomical mechanism, I see the elephant, and am conscious only of that feeling. You may consider my organism geometrically or anatomically, and bring