The human sensorium : investigated as to figure by a course of pressures on the eyes, and by the induced phases and bearings of those sensations of colors called peacock's feathers : being a second supplement to the Rationale of cerebral vision / by John Fearn.

  • John Fearn
Date:
[1832]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The human sensorium : investigated as to figure by a course of pressures on the eyes, and by the induced phases and bearings of those sensations of colors called peacock's feathers : being a second supplement to the Rationale of cerebral vision / by John Fearn. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    ence of a Sensorium, and in our perceiving through the medium of Species, could never have believed that we have an INDUCTIVE knowledge of any external fact. They nevertheless applied the name of induction to their ana- logical INFERENCES of external facts, because they had a real induction of the Sensations on which those inferences were bottomed, and this phraseolog-y saved any expression, and any thinking, of our mental operations in the conduct of the physical processes. In so doing, Newton and his associates never thought that any mischief could arise from the use of the misnomer ; inso- much that, although he expressly explains in his Optics, that we never perceive light, but perceive only our own Sensations of Color, he nevertheless exclaims, upon his opponents, that he does not feign hypotheses;—an assertion which, in strictness, he must have known was not true; but which was true in construction, because all he meant (and he knew he was well understood) was, that he did not frame hypotheses out of his IMAGINATION, but advaficed those only which, as I have said, were bottomed upon his ACTUAL sensations. If this account of Induction, and of Newton's estimate of it, cannot be contraverted ; then, What becomes of the pretence that we are immersed in a perception of the qua- lities of external things ; and frame to ourselves analogies of those external qualities, in order to describe and liken our own modifications? But the mischief which Newton never anticipated has come to pass. In other words, it has, since his time, been started, and erected into a great s&heme of philosophy, that we argue from external qualities, (of wiidch it is certain we never have any induction;) and TO our own modifications, of which alone we have an induction. And the aim, in thus reversing the most certain of any facts in the order and superiority of our knowledge, is to assume that mental qualities have nothing in common with external qualities, i. e. that the Percijnent Subject has no quality in common
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