Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 3 "Philosophical Remains" (1883 ed.).djvu/382

372 have been in the retina when it ought to have been in the grass. A most wise provision of nature it certainly is, by which our visual sensations are disposed of in the right way before we obtain any knowledge of the eye. And most wisely has nature seconded her own scheme by obscuring all the sources from which that knowledge might be derived. The light eyelids—the effortless muscular apparatus performing its ministrations so gently as to be almost unfelt—the tactual sensations so imperceptible when the eye is left to its own motions, so keen when it is invaded by an exploring finger, and so anxious to avoid all contact by which the existence of the organ might be betrayed. All these are so many means adopted by nature to keep back from the infant seer all knowledge of his own eye—a knowledge which, if developed prematurely, would have perverted the functions, if not rendered nugatory the very existence, of the organ.

But, secondly, we have to consider the stage of the process in which vision is in some way associated with an object which in not any of the things with which the visual sensations are connected. It is clear that the process is not completed—that our task, which is to dissolve the primary synthesis of vision and its phenomena, is but half executed, unless such an object be found. For though we have associated the visual sensations (colours) with something different from themselves, still vision clings to them without a hair's-breadth of interval, and pursues