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CONFLUENCE OF OPPOSITES
knowledge. If any one will pause and reflect over what is implied in the term knowledge-observation, investigation, classification, comparison, inference, interpretation, judgment, etc. etc,-and recollection, he will not, I am sure, refuse to lend his assent to the following considered dictum from the pen of Prof. Bowne (see Bowne's Metaphysics, pp. 407-410):—
"By describing the mind as a waxen tablet, and things as impressing themselves upon it, we seem to get a great insight until we think to ask where this extended tablet is, and how things stamp themselves on it, and how the perceptive act could be explained even if they did...... The immediate antecedents of sensation and perception are a series of nervous changes in the brain. Whatever we know of the outer world is revealed only in and through these nervous changes. But these are totally unlike the objecta assumed to exist as their causes. If we might conceive the mind as in the light, and in direct contact with its objects, the imagination at least would be comforted; but when we concieve the mind as coming in contact with the outer world only in the dark chamber of the skull, and then not in contact with the objects perceived, but only with a series of nerve changes of which, moreover, it knows nothing, it is plain that the object is a long way off. All talk of pictures, impressions, etc. ceases because of the lack of all the conditions to give such figures any meaning. It is not even clear that we shall ever find our way out of the darkness into the world of light and reality again. We begin with complete trust in physics and the senses, and are forthwith led away from the object into a nervous labyrinth, where the object is totally
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