NewThoughtLibrary.com / DivineLibrary.org

The light may become so bright as to be painful; the sound so loud or so sharp as to be disagreeable, that is organically disagreeable, and thus these senses serve for the time as avenues to feelings rather than to perceptions. The pleasures that enter the eye and ear in painting, sculpture, music, not being organic but mental, do not interfere with the purely perceptive action of the senses.

In perception, material of knowledge, or of subjective emotions simply, is, through the medium of the organ of sense, brought to the mind. It is only by observation that we know that the eye is the means of sight, or the ear of hearing. Neither of these organs, in their healthy state, give any direct indication of their office, or excite us by any passing sensation in the performance of it. To this fact our language conforms, and we speak of perception, an acting of the mind, through, rather than in, the organ employed.

The sense of touch seems more mixed than any of the others. It declares its locality, and lodges its results as distinct feelings in the finger-ends. Its sensation should, therefore, be primarily ranked with the feelings, and it be regarded as an organ of feeling. Indeed, this conclusion language seems unmistakably to indicate, and in designation we have passed over with the same word feeling, from the external sense to the internal emotion. Touch, however, approaches the two higher senses, in the fact that its sensations are made almost exclusively the ground of inferences rather than of enjoyments, and when highly developed are clear and ultimate in the information imparted, and almost wholly overlooked as forms of feeling. The blind doubtless cease almost entirely to contemplate the agreeable and disagreeable in touch indeed the tactual, character of these sensations and find in them a direct, unconscious medium of knowing. Under such circumstances,