158 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Letters. 



lies in the nature of any motion ... of itself to cease as 

 motion and be reproduced as illuminating brilliancy, as sound, or 

 as sweetness of taste." The motion here referred to is the sensi- 

 ble or physical part of the phenomena of sensatioo. The causal 

 nexus between a wave, whether in the eye or in the air, and the 

 mental conception of light, no man has ever discovered, but the 

 scientist and the philosopher alike, together with universal human- 

 ity, accept with a practical assurance that cannot be shaken the 

 testimony of their consciousness to the objective reality of the 

 things perceived through any organ of sense. In unscientifle 

 terms, then, we may say that we know the things within reach of 

 our senses because we feel them. 



Feeling is the function of all the afferent nerves, and in some 

 mysterious way we hear, taste, see, etc., by feeling. All the 

 mechanism of our organs of sense is necessary to bring the phys- 

 ical within the grasp of the spiritual. By the aid of this mechan- 

 ism we feel, as science insists, not the object, but some quality of 

 the object appropriate to the sense in exercise. The universal 

 consciousness, however, will have it that we feel a hody thus and 

 thus conditioned or qualified. Science says we feel the broad 

 waves of light, or, practically, the redness of a physical body. 

 Consciousness maintains that we see a red hody. It is hazardous 

 to quarrel with universal consciousness. Moreover, it would be 

 unreasonable to reject, concerning the character of the phenom- 

 ena, the testimony of the only authority by which its actuality 

 had been, or could be, established. We dare not, therefore, ban- 

 ish the physical universe from our philosophy; we cannot banish 

 it from our consciousness. Grod himself, in fashioning us so that 

 we are thus compelled to recognize in our daily lives an objective 

 •universe, has involved his own veracity in the validity of these 

 intuitions of our consciousness. 



If we admit, as we seem forced to, that mind and matter can 

 communicate, while their natures are so very unlike, much less 

 should it be thought incredible that mind should be able to con- 

 vey thought to another mind of the same nature. No mechanism 

 can simplify or explain the perception of the physical ; it simply 

 makes it mysteriously possible. The same intuitional power that 



