and
material things. In which case we should have remained blind, or as bad
as blind; brightness would have been in the eye when it ought to have
been in the sun; greenness would have been in the retina when it ought
to have been in the grass. A most wise provision of nature it certainly
is, by which our visual sensations are disposed of in the right way
before we obtain any knowledge of the eye. And most wisely has nature
seconded her own scheme by obscuring all the sources from which that
knowledge might be derived. The light eyelids--the effortless muscular
apparatus performing its ministrations so gently as to be almost
unfelt--the tactual sensations so imperceptible when the eye is left to
its own motions, so keen when it is invaded by an exploring finger, and
so anxious to avoid all contact by which the existence of the organ
might be betrayed. All these are so many means adopted by nature to keep
back from the infant seer all knowledge of his own eye--a knowledge
which, if developed prematurely, would have perverted the functions, if
not rendered nugatory the very existence of the organ.

But, _secondly_, we have to consider the stage of the process in which
vision is in some way associated with an object which is _not_ any of
the things with which the visual sensations are connected. It is clear
that the process is not completed--that our task, which is to dissolve
the primary synthesis of vision and its phenomena, is but half executed,
unless such an object be found. For though we have associated the visual
sensations (colours) with something different from themselves, still
vision clings to them without a hair's-breadth of interval and pursues
them whithersoever they go. As far, then, as we have yet gone, it cannot
be said that our vision is felt or known to be distanced from the fixed
stars even by the diameter of a grain of sand. The synthesis of sight
and colour is not yet discriminated. How, then, is the interval
interposed? We answer, by the discovery of a tangible object in a
different place from any of the tangible objects associated with colour;
and then by associating, in some way or other, the operations of vision
with this object. Such an object is discovered in the eye. Now, as has
frequently been said, we cannot associate colours or the visual
sensations with this eye; for these have been already disposed of
otherwise. What, then, do we associate with it--and how? We find, upon
experiment, that o