40 BEING AND FACULTIES OF MAN. 



eye can perceive colour or can, undirected by the eye, be 

 consciously employed in producing it, the action of the 

 touch can produce sound, and the eye may guide the 

 action of the touch in its production. So that the hearing 

 may be fully corroborated by the action of the touch 

 under or without the guidance of the eye; while the 

 perception of colour can be corroborated by no separate 

 sense, but rests on the testimony of the eye alone. Under 

 the expression colour it will be readily understood that 

 light in all its varieties of white, blue, yellow, red, and 

 intermediate tints is comprehended. Darkness the eye 

 can hardly be said to perceive, since blind men are conscious 

 of that without eyes : darkness to man being, in strict 

 parlance, absence of optical sensation or impression. 



But it is in the sensations of pleasure and pain that all 

 the faculties are distinctive in the highest degree and 

 most widely separated in their experience and the charac- 

 ter of their perceptions from each other. On a common 

 or average level of ordinary experiences they coincide 

 with and corroborate each other in many particulars, but 

 away from that they each and all widely differ, though 

 their difference is not of the nature of contradiction or 

 disagreement. The sensations of pleasure or pain are in 

 no two senses the same, or even similar, except in the one 

 common quality of being liked or disliked by our Con- 

 sciousness. A painful object to the eye has no analogy 

 to what is painful or disagreeable to the touch, taste, 

 smell, or hearing ; and a pleasant landscape is equally 

 inappreciable by the hand, tongue, nose, or ear. Its reality 

 we may prove by testing some of its details with the 

 other senses, but its beauty, and the pleasure its beauty 

 gives, we can recognise and enjoy only by one. " The eye," 

 but the eye only, " loveth light." The other senses 

 perceive it not. And so the ear, but the ear only, appre- 

 ciates the pleasures of sound or music : the smell only 



