Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 3 "Philosophical Remains" (1883 ed.).djvu/407

Rh 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