Page:On the Fourfold Root, and On the Will in Nature.djvu/98

 blind, acquire a sufficiently complete knowledge of the relations of Space, to enable them to replace their want of eyesight by it to a considerable degree, and to perform astonishing feats. A hundred years ago Saunderson, for instance, who was blind from his birth, lectured on Optics, Mathematics, and Astronomy at Cambridge. This, too, is the only way to explain the exactly opposite case of Eva Lauk, who was born without arms or legs, yet acquired an accurate perception of the outer world by means of sight alone as rapidly as other children. All this therefore proves that Time, Space, and Causality are not conveyed into us by touch or by sight, or indeed at all from outside, but that they have an internal, consequently not empirical, but intellectual origin. From this again follows, that the perception of the bodily world is an essentially intellectual process, a work of the Understanding, to which sensation merely gives the opportunity and the data for application in individual cases.

I shall now prove the same with regard to the sense of sight. Here the only immediate datum is the sensation experienced by the retina, which, though admitting of great variety, may still be reduced to the impression of light and dark with their intermediate gradations and to that of colours proper. This sensation is entirely subjective: that is to say, it only exists within the organism and under the skin. Without the Understanding, indeed, we should never even become conscious of these gradations, excepting as of peculiar, varied modifications of the feeling in our eye, which would bear no resemblance to the shape, situation, proximity, or distance of objects outside us. For sensation, in seeing, supplies nothing more than a varied affection of the retina, exactly like the spectacle of a painter's palette