Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 3 "Philosophical Remains" (1883 ed.).djvu/406

396 exercise of vision, is equivalent to asserting that a part is larger than the whole, of which it is only a part—is equivalent to asserting that Y, which is contained between X and Z, is nevertheless of larger compass than X and Z, and comprehends them both. 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 thoroughgoing 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