Molyneux's question : vision, touch, and the philosophy of perception / Michael J. Morgan.

  • Morgan, Michael J. (Michael John), 1942-
Date:
1977
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

Credit: Molyneux's question : vision, touch, and the philosophy of perception / Michael J. Morgan. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    48/236 (page 36)
    MOLYNEUX'S QUESTION the slightest scruple? Ah, Madame! How different the morality of the blind is from our own! How different again would that of a deaf person be to one who was blind: and how imperfect (to put the matter at its lowest] would our own morality seem to a being that possessed an extra sense. Nor do our respective metaphysics agree any better. Their principles are our absurdities, and vice versa. I could entertain you by going into this in considerable detail, except that there are certain people who see crime everywhere, and who would be quick to accuse me of irreligion — as if it were my business to make blind people perceive things differ¬ ently from the way that they do. I shall limit myself to a single observa¬ tion with which everyone must, I think, agree: which is that the famous argument from the design and wonder of nature has little force to the blind.The ease with which we seem to create new objects by a looking-glass is infinitely more mysterious to them than the stars which they are destined never to see. The bright sun moving from the east to the west causes them less astonishment than the small fire which they can augment or diminish as they please. And since they habitually think of matter more abstractly than we do, they have less difficulty in believing it to be sentient. If a man who had seen for as little as a day or two were to find himself in the country of the blind, he would be advised to keep silent, or to be mistaken for a madman. Each day he would announce some new thing which would be to them a marvel, and which the tough-minded scep¬ tics among them would take pleasure in not believing. Religious apologists could make something out of this example of an apparently justified, but actually misplaced scepticism. If you follow up this line of reasoning for a moment, it will recall for you, looked at from another point of view, the life and persecutions of those who have had the misfortune to meet with the truth in times of darkness, and who had the temerity to reveal that truth to their blind contemporaries, amongst whom they found no enemies more cruel than those whom, by reason of their rank and education, one would have expected to be the most sympathetic to their ideas. I leave here the morality and metaphysics of the blind and pass on to things which, although of less importance, are more relevant to the sort of questions that everyone has been asking since Hilmer's operations. First question: how does a man congenitally blind form ideas of shape? I believe that the notion of direction is given to him by the movements of his body, the successive existence of his hand in different places, and by the continuous sensations given to him by an object that slides through his fingers. If he runs his fingers along a taut thread, he will get the idea The 'famous argument' for a Supreme Being. A small advertisement for the theory of panpsychism, that all objects have souls. 38