The Mind and the Brain | Page 6

of the physical excitement.
I believe it has required a long series of accepted observations for us to have arrived at this idea, now so natural in appearance, that the modifications produced within our nervous system are the only states of which we can have a direct consciousness; and as experimental demonstration is always limited, there can be no absolute certainty that things never happen otherwise, that we never go outside ourselves, and that neither our consciousness nor our nervous influx can exteriorise itself, shoot beyond our material organs, and travel afar in pursuit of objects in order to know or to modify them.
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Before going further, we must make our terminology more precise. We have just seen the necessity of drawing a distinction between the sensations of which we are conscious and the unknown cause which produces these sensations by acting on our nervous systems. This exciting cause I have several times termed, in order to be understood, the external object. But under the name of external object are currently designated groups of sensations, such as those which make up for us a chair, a tree, an animal, or any kind of body. I see a dog pass in the street. I call this dog an external object; but, as this dog is formed, for me who am looking at it, of my sensations, and as these sensations are states of my nervous centres, it happens that the term external object has two meanings. Sometimes it designates our sensations; at another, the exciting cause of our sensations. To avoid all confusion we will call this exciting cause, which is unknown to us, the X of matter.
It is, however, not entirely unknown, for we at least know two facts with regard to it. We know, first, that this X exists, and in the second place, that its image must not be sought in the sensations it excites in us. How can we doubt, we say, that it exists? The same external observation proves to us at once that there exists an object distinct from our nerves, and that our nerves separate us from it. I insist on this point, for the reason that some authors, after having unreservedly admitted that our knowledge is confined to sensations, have subsequently been hard put to it to demonstrate the reality of the excitant distinct from the sensations.[6] Of this we need no demonstration, and the testimony of our senses suffices. We have seen the excitant, and it is like a friend who should pass before us in disguise so well costumed and made up that we can attribute to his real self nothing of what we see of him, but yet we know that it is he.
And, in fact, let us remember what it is that we have argued upon--viz. on an observation. I look at my hand, and I see an object approaching it which gives me a sensation of feeling. I at first say that this object is an excitant. It is pointed out to me that I am in error. This object, which appears to me outside my nervous system, is composed, I am told, of sensations. Be it so, I have the right to answer; but if all that I perceive is sensation, my nervous system itself is a sensation; if it is only that, it is no longer an intermediary between the excitant and myself, and it is the fact that we perceive things as they are. For it to be possible to prove that I perceive, not the object, but that tertium quid which is sensation, it has to be admitted that the nervous system is a reality external to sensation and that objects which assume, in relation to it, the r?le of excitants and of which we perceive the existence, are likewise realities external to sensation.
This is what is demonstrated by abstract reasoning, and this reasoning is further supported by a common-sense argument. The outer world cannot be summarised in a few nervous systems suspended like spiders in empty space. The existence of a nervous system implies that of a body in which it is lodged. This body must have complicated organs; its limbs presuppose the soil on which the animal rests, its lungs the existence of oxygen vivifying its blood, its digestive tube, aliments which it digests and assimilates to its substance, and so on. We may indeed admit that this outer world is not, in itself, exactly as we perceive it; but we are compelled to recognise that it exists by the same right as the nervous system, in order to put it in its proper place.
The second fact of observation is that the sensations we feel do not give us the true image of the material X which produces them. The