138 On the Campus 



ness to find ourselves the glad and fortunate possessors 

 of the faculties of hearing, sight, smell, taste, and touch, 

 and the world stands all related to us through these sev- 

 eral channels of appreciation. We are apt to think 

 these infallible. The philosopher lays down as one of 

 his postulates, or did once, the demand that we may not 

 discredit the evidence of our senses. The postulate was 

 just ; but alas, as we have long since learned, only within 

 the limit of nature 's purpose. These senses of ours, * ' in- 

 telligencers, " as Charles Lamb calls them, are guides 

 not infallible but simply reasonably safe in enabling 

 us to make our way about the world. These eyes of ours 

 were never intended primarily to behold the diminutive 

 objects that fill the field of the microscopic vision but 

 simply to prevent our running into objects that might 

 do us injury; the eye of the vulture scans a wider hori- 

 zon, with perception still more keen; our ears, not to 

 hear the harmonies of Beethoven, but simply to perceive 

 those dangers whose oncoming possibly produced noise; 

 and so with all the rest. I venture to discuss all this 

 more particularly, because people are apt to think that 

 our senses involve much more in the field of our complex 

 mental, or intellectual, life than they really do. On the 

 theory here adopted they are all reducible to simple 

 touch, to the faculty of receiving impressions from with- 

 out, and differ only as they lend themselves to impres- 

 sions of different kinds. The history of the development 

 of the individual sense, no less than the comparative 

 study of sentient animals, abundantly establishes this 

 view and we may here assume its truth. 



But there is still another singular fact that we must 



