20 BEING AND FACULTIES OF MAN. 



Whenever we receive impressions without actual contact 

 with the objects or causes which produce them, our con- 

 sciousness comes in contact with the impressions so pro- 

 duced, and not with the objects or causes themselves ; and 

 this applies especially to what is seen and heard by us, 

 for in these cases the impression produced on the eye or 

 the ear is all that our consciousness comes in contact with 

 by seeing or hearing. And as hearing and vision are thus 

 faculties, or powers of perception, which do not come into 

 actual contact with the objects or causes from which 

 their impressions proceed, but only with the impressions 

 proceeding from those objects, it follows that the eye and 

 the ear must be much more subject to influences which 

 simulate their real impressions, and must therefore be 

 more liable to deception than the other senses are. And the 

 experiences detailed by natural magic show this to be 

 strictly true. The senses of taste, touch, and smell, are 

 rarely deceived in comparison with the senses of seeing 

 and hearing, and the means of deceiving the former are 

 much more limited in number than those which may be 

 brought to bear upon the two latter faculties. This will 

 be better understood from the following analytical com- 

 parison of the powers of the various senses. 



Pleasure and pain the agreeable and disagreeable are 

 more or less common sensations of all the faculties ; but 

 two of our senses, Feeling and Taste, involve touch, or 

 actual contact, and the perception of temperature in their 

 exercise. Two others, Sight and Hearing, do not involve 

 touch, or actual contact, neither do they involve as a 

 sensation the perception of temperature. The fifth sense, 

 Smell, occupies an intermediate position between the four 

 others which are thus arranged into two sets, and partakes, 

 and in part does not partake, of the powers of each set ; for 

 the sense of Smell, or the olfactory organization, does not 

 as a rule come into actual contact with the object from 



