60 Natural Theology. 



require for a blind man to learn what one glance of 

 the eye may give to one blessed with sight ! This 

 sense also gives certain ideas which the blind could 

 never acquire, as of color, transparency, and play of 

 light. But of those properties and relations that 

 could be learned by the sense of touch, the eye will 

 take in more in the landscape in one moment than 

 could be otherwise learned in a lifetime. A race 

 of blind men could not exist on this globe. 



The sense of sight alone, as a means of adapting 

 us to the world, would strike us as wonderful in its 

 results, and worthy of the conception of the highest 

 intelligence in adapting means to ends, if we knew 

 nothing of the adjustments by which sight is se- 

 cured. We can conceive of the power of sight as 

 direct perception, without the aid of light, or of a 

 special organ corresponding to the eye. But con- 

 stituted as we are, we see only through the agency 

 of light ; and we perceive light only by a special 

 organ ; and objects only in consequence of a pecu- 

 liar structure of that organ. Of all of these rela- 

 tionships of light to objects, and of light to the eye, 

 and of the parts of the eye to each other, not one 

 of them is a necessary condition of matter. The 

 arrangement of so many things by which this won- 

 derful power of perceiving distant objects is secured, 

 is the only one that will secure the end desired, out 

 of an endless number of arrangements that can be 

 conceived of. The first thing we notice is the rela- 

 tion of the light to the atmosphere, by which it bathes 

 all objects, unless they are cut off from it by special 



