Our Sensations and the Things That Produce Them

There is a difference between our sensation of light and the objects that we see.

People say that the objects in our thought are totally like the physical objects which they come from.

On the contrary, I note many experiences where this is not true.

I think that words do not resemble the things they signify. Yet they still cause us to conceive of those things, often without our paying attention to:

• the sound of the words or
• their syllables.

Words come from human convention. They cause us to conceive of things.

Our ears lets us hear the sound of the words. Our eyes lets us see the faces of persons.

But it is our mind that gives us the meaning of those sounds and faces, having remembered what those sounds and that face signify at the same time.[3]

Our mind represents to us the idea of light each time the light-action touches our eye.

Sometimes, we hear words and get only their sounds, without paying attention to their meaning of those words.

• This sound creates an idea in our thought.
• This idea then resembles the original cause of those words.

A man opens his mouth, moves his tongue, forces out his breath.

In all these actions, I see nothing that is not very different from the idea of the sound that they cause us to imagine.

Sound is a mere vibration of air that strikes against our ears.

Thus, if our sense of hearing were to report to our mind the true image of its object, then it would have to cause us to conceive of the motion of the parts of air that then vibrate against our ears.

Of all our senses, touch is the one least misleading and most certain.

Everyone knows the ideas of tickling and of pain. These are formed in our thought when we are touched. This tickling and pain feeling are different from those things touching us.

If you pass a feather over the lips of a child who is falling asleep, and he perceives it, will he [4] conceive it as resembling anything in this feather?

A soldier returns from battle. As he begins to cool off, he feels pain and worries that he has been wounded. He finds that it was nothing but a buckler which was caught under his armor pressing on him. If the image of the buckler appeared to his mind after feeling its pain, then he would not need to worry.

Likewise, the objects that we see is the same as how the touch of a feather causes tickles and the buckler causes pain. [Touch conveys the tickle, not the feather. It conveys the pain of the buckler, not the buckler.]

Similarly, the light is like this touch. It is different from the actual object that it comes from.