Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 1.djvu/711

Rh form, which we derive from the visual sense alone, is so complete that we seldom require to fall back upon the touch for any further information respecting that quality of the object. So, again, while it is from the coordination of the two dissimilar pictures formed by any solid or projecting object upon our two retinæ that (as Sir Charles Wheatstone's admirable investigations have shown) we ordinarily derive through the sight alone a correct notion of its solid form, there is adequate evidence that this notion also is a mental judgment based on the experience we have acquired in early infancy by the consentaneous exercise of the visual and tactile senses.

Take, again, the case of those wonderful instruments by which our visual range is extended almost into the infinity of space or into the infinity of minuteness. It is the mental, not the bodily, eye that takes cognizance of what the telescope and the microscope reveal to us. For, we should have no well-grounded confidence in their revelations as to the unknown, if we had not first acquired experience in distinguishing the true from the false by applying them to known objects; and every interpretation of what we see through their instrumentality is a mental judgment as to the probable form, size, and movement of bodies removed by either their distance or their minuteness from being cognosced by our sense of touch.

The case is still stronger in regard to that last addition to our scientific armamentum which promises to be not inferior in value either to the telescope or the microscope; for it may be truly said of the spectroscope that it has not merely extended the range of our vision, but has almost given us a new sense by enabling us to recognize distinctive properties in the chemical elements which were previously quite unknown. And who shall now say that we know all that is to be known as to any form of matter, or that the science of the fourth quarter of this century may not furnish us with as great an enlargement of our knowledge of its properties, and of our power of recognizing them, as that of its third has done?

But, it may be said, Is not this view of the material universe open to the imputation that it is "evolved out of the depths of our own consciousness"—a projection of our own intellect into what surrounds us—an ideal rather than a real world? If all we know of matter be an "intellectual conception," how are we to distinguish this from such as we form in our dreams, for these, as our Laureate no less happily than philosophically expresses it, are "true while they last." Here our "common-sense" comes to the rescue. We "awake, and behold it was a dream." Every healthy mind is conscious of the difference between his waking and his dreaming experiences, or, if he is now and then puzzled to answer the question, "Did this really happen or did I dream it?" the perplexity arises from the consciousness that it might have happened. And every healthy mind, finding its own experiences of its waking state not only self-consistent, but consistent with