which gives each man a paramount and indisputable title to that "treasure trove" which he calls his own body. Now, it is only after going through a considerable course of experience and experiment, that we can ascertain what the particular sensations are upon which all our other sensations are dependent. And therefore were we not right in saying that a man's body is not given to him directly and at once, but that he takes a certain time, and must go through a certain process, to acquire it?
The conclusion which we would deduce from the whole of the foregoing remarks is, that the great law of living[1] sensation, the rationale of sensation as a living process, is this, that the senses are not merely presentative, i.e., they not only bring sensations before us, but that they are self-presentative, i.e., they, moreover, bring themselves before us as sensations. But for this law we should never get beyond our mere subjective modifications; but, in virtue of it, we necessarily get beyond them; for the results of the law are—1st, that we, the subject, restrict ourselves to, or identify ourselves with, the senses, not as displayed in their
- ↑ We say living, because every attempt hitherto made to explain sensation has been founded on certain appearances manifested in the dead subject. By inspecting a dead carcass we shall never discover the principle of life; by inspecting a dead eye or a camera obscura, we shall never discover the principle of vision. Yet, though there is no seeing in a dead eye, or in a camera obscura, optics deal exclusively with such inanimate materials; and hence the student who studies them will do well to remember, that optics are the science of vision, with the fact of vision left entirely out of the consideration.
