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1843.] The fallacy we conceive to be this, that the visible body can be contained within the eye, without the eye of the visible body also being contained therein. But this is a procedure, which no law, either of thought or imagination, will tolerate. If we turn the visible body, and all visible things, into the eye, we must turn the eye of the visible body also into the eye; a process which, of course, again turns the visible body, and all visible things, out of the eye. And thus the procedure eternally defeats itself. Thus the very law which appears to annihilate, or render impossible, the objective existence of visible things, as creations independent of the eye—this very law, when carried into effect with a thorough-going consistency, vindicates and establishes that objective existence, with a logical force, an iron necessity, which no physiological paradox can countervail.

We have now probably said enough to convince the attentive reader, that the sense of sight, when brought under its own notice as a sensation, either directly, or through the ministry of the touch or of the imagination, (as it is when revealed to us in its organ,) falls very far—falls almost infinitely within its own sphere. Sight, revealing itself as a sense, spreads over a span commensurate with the diameter of the whole visible space; sight, revealing itself as a sensation, dwindles to a speck of almost unappreciable insignificance, when compared with the other phenomena which fall within the visual ken. This speck is the organ, and the organ is the sentient circumference drawn inwards, far within itself, according to a law which (however unconscious we may be of its operation) presides over every act and exercise of vision—a law which, while it contracts the sentient sphere, throws, at the same time, into necessary objectivity every phenomenon that falls external to the diminished circle. This is the law in virtue of which subjective visual sensations are real visible objects. The moment the sight becomes one of its own sensations, it is restricted, in a peculiar manner, to that particular sensation. It now falls, as we have said, within its own sphere. Now, nothing more was wanting to make the other visual sensations real independent existences; for, quà sensations, they are all originally independent of each other, and the sense itself being now a sensation, they must now also be independent of it.

We now pass on to the consideration of the sense of touch.

Here precisely the same process is gone through which was observed to take place in the case of vision. The same law manifests itself here, and the same inevitable consequence follows, namely —that sensations are things—that subjective affections are objective realities. The sensation of hardness (softness, be it observed, is only an inferior degree of hardness, and therefore the latter word is the proper generic term to be employed)—the sensation of hardness forms the contents of this sense. Hardness, we will say, is originally a purely subjective affection. The question, then, is, how can this affection, without being thrust forth into a fictitious, transcendent, and incomprehensible universe, assume, nevertheless, a distinct objective reality, and be (not as it were, but in language of the most unequivocating truth) a permanent existence altogether independent of the sense? We answer, that this can take place only provided the sense of touch can be brought under our notice as itself hard. If this can be shown to take place, then (as all sensations which are presented to us in space necessarily exclude one another, are reciprocally out of each other) all other instances of hardness must of necessity fall as extrinsic to that particular hardness which the sense reveals to us as its own; and, consequently, all these other instances of hardness will start into being, as things endowed with a permanent and independent substance.

Now, what is the verdict of experience on the subject? The direct and unequivocal verdict of experience is, that the touch reveals itself to us as one of its own sensations. In the finger-points more particularly, and generally all over the surface of the body, the touch manifests itself not only as that which apprehends hardness, but as that which is itself hard. The sense of touch vested in one of its own sensations (our tangible bodies namely) is the sense of touch brought within its own sphere. It comes before itself as one sensation of hardness. Consequently all its other sensations of hardness are necessarily