Knowledge, Theory of; Metaphysics; Philosophy -- Introductions
It is sometimes said that 'light _is_ a form of wave-motion', but this
is misleading, for the light which we immediately see, which we know
directly by means of our senses, is _not_ a form of wave-motion, but
something quite different--something which we all know if we are not
blind, though we cannot describe it so as to convey our knowledge to a
man who is blind. A wave-motion, on the contrary, could quite well be
described to a blind man, since he can acquire a knowledge of space by
the sense of touch; and he can experience a wave-motion by a sea voyage
almost as well as we can. But this, which a blind man can understand, is
not what we mean by _light_: we mean by _light_ just that which a blind
man can never understand, and which we can never describe to him.
Now this something, which all of us who are not blind know, is not,
according to science, really to be found in the outer world: it is
something caused by the action of certain waves upon the eyes and nerves
and brain of the person who sees the light. When it is said that light
_is_ waves, what is really meant is that waves are the physical cause of
our sensations of light. But light itself, the thing which seeing people
experience and blind people do not, is not supposed by science to form
any part of the world that is independent of us and our senses. And very
similar remarks would apply to other kinds of sensations.
It is not only colours and sounds and so on that are absent from the
scientific world of matter, but also _space_ as we get it through sight
or touch. It is essential to science that its matter should be in _a_
space, but the space in which it is cannot be exactly the space we see
or feel. To begin with, space as we see it is not the same as space as
we get it by the sense of touch; it is only by experience in infancy
that we learn how to touch things we see, or how to get a sight of
things which we feel touching us. But the space of science is neutral as
between touch and sight; thus it cannot be either the space of touch or
the space of sight.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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