Page:Russell - An outline of philosophy.pdf/34

22 but an anterior event related to it in a way that requires investigation. The same applies to hearing and smell, but not to touch or to perception of states of our own body. In these cases, the first of the above four stages is absent. It is clear that, in the case of sight, hearing and smell, there must be a certain relation between the stimulus and the event said to be perceived, but we will not now consider what this relation must be. We will consider, rather, the second, third, and fourth stages in an act of perceptive knowledge. This is the more legitimate as these stages always exist, whereas the first is confined to certain senses.

The second stage is that which proceeds from the sense-organ to the brain. It is not necessary for our purposes to consider exactly what goes on during this journey. A purely physical event—the stimulus—happens at the boundary of the body, and has a series of effects which travel along the afferent nerves to the brain. If the stimulus is light, it must fall on the eye to produce the characteristic effects; no doubt light falling on other parts of the body has effects, but they are not those that distinguish vision. Similarly, if the stimulus is sound, it must fall on the ear. A sense-organ, like a photographic plate, is responsive to stimuli of a certain sort: light falling on the eye has effects which are different for different wave-lengths, intensities, and directions. When the events in the eye due to incident light have taken place, they are followed by events in the optic nerve, leading at last to some occurrence in the brain—an occurrence which varies with the stimulus. The occurrence in the brain must be different for different stimuli in all cases where we can perceive differences. Red and yellow, for instance, are distinguishable in perception; therefore the occurrences along the optic nerve and in the brain must have a different character when caused by red light from what they have when caused by yellow light. But when two shades of colour are so similar that they can only be distinguished by delicate instruments, not by perception, we cannot be sure that they cause occurrences of different characters in the optic nerve and brain.