250 
Vital and Cosmical Energy. 
[May, 
rest on the same foundation. The little work before us may 
prove a valuable aid in the solution of this momentous 
problem. 
In the present day no man possessing any acquaintance 
with the mechanism of the sensory organs can completely 
ignore the phenomenal or ideal theory. Its truths are forced 
upon him, whether he will or no ; and at the end of his re- 
searches he is compelled to admit that his experiments upon 
those phenomena which he calls muscle and nerve have 
really been experiments upon varied modifications of his own 
consciousness. He finds that the nervous excitations which 
produce sensations so diverse as those of sight, hearing, 
taste, smell, and touch, are all essentially the same during 
their journey from the receptive organ to the brain. In 
every case a special apparatus receives a special impulse, 
which it transmits to a special region of the cerebrum ; but 
the difference which exists between incident waves of light 
and sound, and impressions of touch, smell, and taste, is 
lost during transmission. When the motion thus propagated 
arrives at its terminus in the encephalon, it excites the 
sensation peculiar to that group of nerve-cells which is 
affedted ; but the mode of vibration which was communi- 
cated to eye or ear is not necessarily reproduced, and can 
obviously have nothing in common with the subjective phe- 
nomenon. “ Supposing that the nerves of hearing and of 
sight of a man were cut, and the peripheric end of the 
former were perfectly united with the central end of the 
latter, and contrariwise that the peripheric end of the nerve 
of sight were perfectly united with the central end of the 
nerve of hearing, then the sound of an orchestra would elicit 
in us the sensation of light and colour, and the sight of a 
highly-coloured pidture would elicit in us impressions of 
sound. The sensations which we receive from outward im- 
pressions are therefore not dependent on the nature of those 
impressions, but on the nature of our nerve-cells. We feel 
not that which adts on our bodies, but only that which goes 
on in our brain.”* Idealism is thus irrevocably established ; 
yet we must warn the opponents of Materialism not to in- 
dulge in premature exultation. All knowledge is derived 
from phenomena ; but the existence of an independent 
proplasm or matrix of phenomena is not therefore dis- 
proved ; and if it be a necessary postulate, without which 
both psychical and physical science are empty delusions, we 
must accept this unknown Matter as the basis of our ideal 
Muscles and Nerves, by Dr. J. Rosenthal, p. 283. 
