20 THE EYE 



that the excitation of each sense calls forth a wholly 

 different conception in our minds. Thus, the organs of 

 sense stand as mediators between the outer soulless world, 

 which is laid open and made practicable to our footsteps by 

 science, and the beautiful world which we spiritually discover 

 within us. These first experience the impressions, these 

 deliver over then the suggestions to the mind, suggestions 

 guided by which the mind executes its world-pictures in 

 colour and form. Let us now seek for what is essential in 

 these organs of sense the artfully contrived skeleton, at 

 once so firm and mobile, the powerful muscles which by 

 their contraction set in motion that lever-work of bones 

 the heart with its multitude of tubes the veins, a 

 hydraulic engine of masterly execution, which drives the 

 nutrient fluid, the blood, through every part the whole 

 complicated structure of receptacles and canals into which 

 the food is received, in manifold ways chemically decom- 

 posed and again combined, here mingled with the blood, 

 there rejected as useless the multitude of fibres and mem- 

 branes which bind all parts together, enclose the whole and 

 round it into the fair form of humanity it is none of 

 these. No part of all this reaches up to the domain of 

 spirit. But through all these structures, penetrating all, 

 pass millions of the most delicate filaments, the nerves, 

 which at one extremity spread out in those parts, at the 

 other gather together in a single hemisphere, the brain. 

 These filaments it is which are excited by contact with the 

 motions and changes of the external world, and convey 

 this stimulus to the brain. But the brain is the mys- 

 terious place where soul and body meet. Every alteration 

 in the brain is accompanied by change in the play of our 

 ideas ; with every thought directed to the external world, 

 there is a concurrent alteration in the brain, which is con- 



