Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 3 "Philosophical Remains" (1883 ed.).djvu/378

368 there is the thing seen; and where the thing seen is, there is the seeing of it.

But man is not a mere seeing animal. He has other senses besides: He has, for example, the sense of touch, and one of the most important offices which this sense performs, is to break up the identity of cohesion which subsists between sight and its objects. And how? We answer, by teaching us to associate vision in general, or the abstract condition regulating our visual impressions, with the presence of the small tangible body we call the eye, and vision in particular, or the individual sensations of vision (i.e., colours), with the presence of immeasurably larger bodies revealed to us by touch, and tangibly external to the tangible eye. Sight, as we have said, does not inform us that its sensations are situated in the eye: it does not inform us that we have an eye at all. Neither does touch inform us that our visual sensations are located in the eye. It does not lead us to associate with the eye any of the visual phenomena or operations in the first instance. If it did, it would, firstly, either be impossible for it afterwards to induce us to associate them with the presence of tangible bodies distant and different from the eye: or, secondly, such an association would merely give birth to the abstract knowledge or conclusion, that these bodies were in one place, while the sensations suggesting them were felt to be associated with something in another place; colour would not be seen—as it is—incarnated with body: or, thirdly, we should be compelled to