On the other hand, an observation which trenches on the province of
æsthetics may find its place here. It follows from the proved intellectual
nature of perception that the sight of beautiful objects—for example, of a
beautiful view—is also a _phenomenon of the brain_. Its purity and
completeness, therefore, depends not merely on the object, but also upon
the quality of the brain, its form and size, the fineness of its texture,
and the stimulation of its activity by the strength of the pulse of the
arteries which supply it. Accordingly the same view appears in different
heads, even when the eyes are equally acute, as different as, for example,
the first and last impressions of a copper plate that has been much used.
This is the explanation of the difference of capacity for enjoying natural
beauty, and consequently also for reproducing it, _i.e._, for occasioning
a similar phenomenon of the brain by means of an entirely different kind
of cause, the arrangement of colours on a canvas.
The apparent immediacy of perception, depending on its entire
intellectuality, by virtue of which, as Euler says, we apprehend the thing
itself, and as external to us, finds an analogy in the way in which we
feel the parts of our own bodies, especially when they suffer pain, which
when we do feel them is generally the case. Just as we imagine that we
perceive things where they are, while the perception really takes place in
the brain, we believe that we feel the pain of a limb in the limb itself,
while in reality it also is felt in the brain, to which it is conducted by
the nerve of the affected part. Therefore, only the affections of those
parts whose nerves go to the brain are felt, and not those of the parts
whose nerves belong to the sympathetic system, unless it be that an
unusually strong affection of these parts penetrates by some roundabout
way to the brain, where yet for the most part it only makes itself known
as a dull sense of discomfort, and always without definite determination
of its locality. Hence, also, it is that we do not feel injuries to a limb
whose nerve-trunk has been severed or ligatured. And hence, finally, the
man who has lost a limb still sometimes feels pain in it, because the
nerves which go to the brain are still there. Thus, in the two phenomena
here compared, what goes on in the brain is apprehended as outside of it;
in the case of perception, by means of the understanding, which extends
its feelers into the outer world; in the case of the feeling of our limbs,
by means of the nerves.
Chapter III. On The Senses.
It is not the object of my writings to repeat what has been said by
others, and therefore I only make here some special remarks of my own on
the subject of the senses.