Page:Blackwood's Magazine volume 051.djvu/844

colours in the form of houses, clouds, rivers, woods, and mountains. Everything is excluded but sight and colours. Nothing but pure seeing is the order of the day. Now, here it is obvious that the seer must pronounce itself or its organ to be precisely commensurate in extent with the things seen. It may either suppose the diameter of the landscape to be conformed to the size of its diameter, or it may suppose its diameter conformed to the size of the landscape. It is quite immaterial which it does, but one or other of these judgments it must form. The seer and the seen must be pronounced to be coextensive with one another. No judgment to a contrary effect—no judgment that the organ is infinitely disproportioned to its objects, is as yet possible. Well, we shall suppose that these objects keep shifting up and down within the sphere of the organ, growing larger and smaller, fainter and brighter in colour, and so forth. Still no new result takes place: there is still nothing but simple seeing. Until at length one particular bifurcated phenomenon, with black extremities at one end and lateral appendages, each of them terminating in a somewhat broad instrument, with five points of rather a pinky hue, begins to stir. Ha! what's this? This is something new—this is something very different from seeing. One of the objects within the sight, one of our own visual phenomena has evolved, by all that's wonderful! a new set of sensations entirely different from anything connected with vision. We will call them muscular sensations. As this is the only one of all the visual phenomena which has evolved these new sensations, the attention of the seer is naturally directed to its operations. Let us then attend to it particularly. It moves into close proximity with other visual objects, and here another new and startling series of sensations ensues—sensations which our seer never found to arise when any of the other visual phenomena came together. We will call these our sensations of touch. The attention is now directed more particularly than ever to the proceedings of this bifurcated phenomenon. It raises one of the aforesaid lateral appendages, and with one of the points in which it terminates, it feels its way over the other portions of its surface. Certain portions of this touched surface are not visible; but the seer, by calling into play the muscular sensations, that is, by moving the upper part of this phenomenon, can bring many of them within its sphere, and hence the seer concludes that all of the felt portions would become visible, were no limit put to these movements and muscular sensations. Very well. This point, which occupies an infinitely small space among the visual phenomena, continues its manipulating progress, until it at length happens to rest upon a very sensitive and orbed surface, about its own size, situated in the upper part of the bifurcated object. And now what ensues? Speaking out of the information and experience which we have as yet acquired, we should naturally say that merely this can ensue—that if the point (let us now call it our finger) and the orbed surface on which it rests are out of the sphere of sight, the seer has nothing to do with it—that it is simply a case of touch: or if the finger and the surface are within the sphere of sight, that then the finger will merely hide from our view a surface coextensive with itself, as it does in other similar instances—and that in either case, all the other objects of sight will be left as visible and entire as ever. But no; neither of these two results is what ensues. What then does ensue? This astounding and almost inconceivable result ensues, that the whole visual phenomena are suddenly obliterated as completely as if they had never been. One very small visible point, performing certain operations within the eye, and coming in contact with a certain surface as small as itself, and which must also be conceived as lying within the eye, not only obliterates that small surface, but extinguishes a whole landscape which is visibly many million times larger than itself. If this result were not the fact, it would be altogether incredible. From this moment, then, a new world is revealed to us, in which we find that instead of the man: and all visible objects being in the eye, the eye is in the man; and that these objects being visibly external to the bifurcated phenomenon, whose operations we have been superintending, and which we shall now call ourselves—they must consequently be external (although even yet they are never visibly so) to the eye also. The seer, the great eye, within which we supposed all this to be transacted, breaks, as it were, and falls away; while the little