Seeing and thinking / by William Kingdom Clifford.

Date:
1879
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Seeing and thinking / by William Kingdom Clifford. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

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    Now the answers that we should naturally give to the last two questions, viz. that we see with our eyes, and that we think either with our brains or our minds, are practically correct. Either of them is right enough for practical purposes, but neither is perfectly correct; and it is in order to show you what the more correct answer is which further knowledge enables us to give, that I want to explain to you to- night something about the mechanism of the brain and the mechanism by which it is connected with the eye. When we have considered this subject com- pletely, we shall find out, I think, that it is not quite correct to say that we see with our eyes, and in the same way that it does not quite accurately represent the facts to say that we think with our brains or even with our minds. Suppose that you see a person’s hand resting upon the table at tea-time, and that you take a hot spoon out of your tea-cup and put it without any warning upon that person’s hand, you will find that the hand will jump as soon as the spoon touches it. In the same way, if you suddenly tread upon a person’s toe, you will find that the foot by a con- vulsive movement gets out of the way. A similar fact to that is this, that if you suddenly touch a frog which does not expect to be touched, the frog will jump and get out of the way. But there is this
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