Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 3 "Philosophical Remains" (1883 ed.).djvu/405

Rh refers to, and which he tells us we never get beyond? If it be—why, then, the very admission that this eye is a part of the visible body (and what else can we conceive the eye to be?) proves that we must get beyond it. Even supposing that the whole operation were transacted within the eye, and that the visible body were nowhere but within the eye, still the eye which we invariably and inevitably fill in as belonging to the visible body (and no other eye is ever thought of or spoken of by us),—this eye, we say, must necessarily exclude the visible body, and all other visible things, from its sphere. Or, can the eye (always conceived of as a visible thing among other visible things) again contain the very phenomenon (i.e. the visible body) within which it is itself contained? Surely no one will maintain a position of such unparalleled absurdity as that.

The science of optics, in so far as it maintains, according to certain physiological principles, that in the operation of seeing we never get beyond the representations within the eye, is founded on the assumption that the visible body has no visible eye belonging to it. Whereas we maintain that the only eye that we have—the only eye we can form any conception of—is the visible eye that belongs to the visible body, as a part does to a whole; whether this eye be originally revealed to us by the touch, by the sight, by the reason, or by the imagination. We maintain that to affirm we never get beyond this eye in the