Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 3 "Philosophical Remains" (1883 ed.).djvu/351

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 surface to which the forefinger was applied, and which it covered, becomes, and from this time henceforward continues to be, our true eye. Thus, by a very singular process, do we find ourselves, as it were, within our own eye, a procedure which is rescued from absurdity by this consideration, that our eye itself, our tangible eye, is also found within the primary eye, as we may call it, which latter eye falling away when the experience of touch commences, the man and the universe which surrounds him start forth into their true place as external to the seer, and the new secondary eye, revealed by touch, becoming localised, shrinks into its true proportions, now very limited when tactually compared with the objects which fall under its inspection. And all this magical creation—all our knowledge that objects are out of the eye, and that the size of this organ bears an infinitely small pro-