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it now does instantly, like a flash of light, though it has acquired the power of doing it slowly, by much and forgotten experience.. The primitive, intellectual elements are wholly unlike this final result, these data of sense intershot with a few firm threads from the shuttle of reason. Indeed, no instance in our later knowledge, in which an entire system of principles is evolved from a few facts, more evinces the astonishing power which belongs to the mind, than does this simplest, earliest, most common case of reasoning, that of perception.

That color is known as the motion of an ethereal medium on the retina, or that there is any connection of the two, or knowledge of the one in and through the other, are statements hot intelligible even, till science by secondary inquiries has made them so. The transfer of motion at one sense into vision, at another into hearing, and in the brain itself into thought, are inexplicable transformations, whose terms we only know by independent investigation, and even then fail of their connection. To suppose that any portion of this knowledge comes directly in perception, is the most obvious and violent perversion of experience.

If we were directly cognizant of the content in the organ of sense, cognizant of it for what it is and where it is physically, there would be no opportunity for deception or oversight in matters of perception. A force acting on a machine tells, and must tell, for exactly what it is. The effect is direct and inevitable. So would it be in perception. We should never make a ghost of a stump, or overlook altogether the objects whose images are actually on the retina; that have actually caused the light to impinge with customary power on this sensitive medium. It is because the mind gives a frightened attention or no attention, inadequate interpretation or no interpretation, to these objects,