THE SENSES. 39 



testified of its existence. These two witnesses therefore, 

 Touch and Taste, give evidence to us, by actual contact in 

 which our Consciousness partakes, of external matter, its 

 actuality and certain of its qualities ; and, of these, its 

 temperature more especially. Their perception of this 

 last quality being corroborative evidence, but distinctive 

 while it is so ; for what is warm to the touch may be, 

 and at ordinary temperatures generally is, cold, or not so 

 warm to the taste the taste being warmer than the touch, 

 as we find by applying the hand to the tongue : so that 

 an object which the hand would not melt, or warm by 

 contact with it, the tongue may ; and thus these two senses 

 confirm each other even while they differ, and may be 

 called the positive senses, while the eye and the ear are 

 only capable of being ranked as abstract senses, whose 

 function is not to prove the reality of matter, but, after its 

 reality has been proved by these two other senses, to aid 

 in revealing its comparative relation to other material 

 objects and its points of difference and distinctive iden- 

 tity. Thus neither the eye nor the ear comes into actual 

 contact with objects. The eye perceives only the form 

 and character of surface, and the relative size, position and 

 colour of objects; and all of these but colour the sense of 

 touch can ordinarily corroborate and confirm, or rather 

 positively ascertain for us without the eye, where objects 

 are within reach ; so that colour may be said to be all 

 that the eye distinctively perceives of objects more than 

 the touch. But while the eye perceives many qualities 

 of objects in common with touch, and only colour distinc- 

 tively and by itself, the ear perceives hearing or sound 

 by itself exclusively, but does not perceive anything in 

 common with the other faculties. Yet even in this dis- 

 tinctiveness the ear is not so entirely separated from the 

 corroboration of the other faculties as the eye is in its 

 perception of colour ; for while no other faculty but the 



