hese experiments prove that it is the sense itself, and
nothing else, which reveals itself to us in the particular phenomenon the
eye. If experience informed us that the particular adjustment of some
other visual phenomenon (a book, for instance) were essential to our
apprehension of all the other phenomena, we should, in the same way, be
compelled to regard this book as our sense of sight manifested in one of
its own sensations. The book would be to us what the eye now is: it would
be our bodily organ: and no _a priori_ reason can be shown why this might
not have been the case. All that we can say is, that such is not the
finding of experience. Experience points out the eye, and the eye alone,
as the visual sensation essential to our apprehension of all our other
sensations of vision, and we come at last to regard this sensation as the
sense itself. Inveterate association leads us to regard the eye, not
merely as the organ, but actually as the sense of vision. We find from
experience how much depends upon its possession, and we lay claim to it as
a part of ourselves, with an emphasis that will not be gainsaid.

An interesting enough subject of speculation would be, an enquiry into the
gradual steps by which each man is led to _appropriate_ his own body. No
man's body is given him absolutely, indefeasibly, and at once, _ex dono
Dei_. It is no unearned hereditary patrimony. It is held by no _a priori_
title on the part of the possessor. The credentials by which its tenure is
secured to him, are purely of an _a posteriori_ character; and a certain
course of experience must be gone through before the body can become his.
The man acquires it, as he does originally all other property, in a
certain formal and legalized manner. Originally, and in the strict legal
as well as metaphysical idea of them, all bodies, living as well as dead,
human no less than brute, are mere _waifs_--the property of the first
finder. But the law, founding on sound metaphysical principles, very
properly makes a distinction here between two kinds of finding. To entitle
a person to claim a human body as his own, it is not enough that he should
find it in the same way in which he finds his other sensations, namely, as
impressions which interfere not with the manifestations of each other.
This is not enough, even though, in the case supposed, the person should
be the first finder. A subsequent finder would have the preference, if
able to show that the par