The Complete Essays (104 page)

Invenies primis ab sensibus esse creatam
Notitiam veri, neque sensus posse refelli.
Quid majore fide porro quam sensus haberi
Debet?

[You realize that the conception of truth is produced by the basic senses; the senses cannot be refuted. What should we trust more than our senses, then?]
⁴²²

Attribute as little to them as you can, but you will have to grant them this: that all the instruction we receive is conveyed by them and through them. Cicero says that when Chrysippus assayed denying their force and power, so many contrary arguments and overwhelming objections occurred to him that he could not answer them. Whereupon Carneades, who maintained the opposite side, boasted of fighting him with his own words and weapons, exclaiming, ‘Wretch! You have been defeated by your own strength!’
⁴²³

For us there is absolutely nothing more absurd than to say that fire is not hot; that light does not illuminate; that iron has no weight or resistance. Those are notions conveyed to us by our senses. There is no belief or knowledge in man of comparable certainty.

Now, on the subject of the senses, my first point is that I doubt that Man is provided with all the natural senses.
⁴²⁴
I note that several creatures live full, complete lives without sight; others, without hearing. Who can tell whether we, also, lack one, two, three or more senses? If we do lack any, our reason cannot even discover that we do so. Our senses are privileged to be the ultimate frontiers of our perception: beyond them there is nothing which could serve to reveal the existence of the senses we lack. One sense cannot reveal another:

[B]    
An poterunt oculos aures reprehendere, an aures
Tactus, an hunc porro tactum sapor arguet oris,
An confutabunt nares, oculive revincent?

[Can the ears correct the eyes; the ears the touch? Can the tastes in our mouths correct the touch? Or will our nostrils and our eyes prove touch to be wrong?]

[A] They all form, each one of them, the ultimate boundary of our faculty of knowledge:

seorsum cuique potestas
Divisa est, sua vis cuique est
.

[For each has received its share and power, quite separate from the others.]
⁴²⁵

A man born blind cannot be made to
understand
what it is not to see; he cannot be made to wish he had sight and to regret what he is lacking. (Therefore we ought not to take comfort from our souls’ being happy and satisfied with the senses we do have; if we are deprived and imperfect, our souls have no way of sensing it.) It is impossible to say anything to that blind man by reason, argument or comparison, which will fix in his understanding what light, colour and sight really are. There is nothing beyond the senses which can supply evidence of them. We do find people who are born blind expressing a wish to see: that does not mean that they know what they are asking for. They have learned from us that they lack something which we have, and they wish that they had it; [C] they name it all right, as well as its effects and its consequences; [A] but they do not know what it is, for all that; they cannot even get near to grasping what it is.

I have met a nobleman of good family who was born blind, or, at least, blind enough not to know what sight is. He has so little knowledge of what he is lacking that he is always using words appropriate to seeing, just as we do; he applies them in his own peculiar way. When he was presented with one of his own godchildren, he took him in his arms and said: ‘My God, what a handsome child. How nice to see him! What a happy face he has.’ He will say (like one of us): ‘What a lovely view there is from this room! What a clear day. How bright the sun is.’ And that is not all. Hearing how much we enjoy the sports of hunting, tennis and shooting, he likes them, too; he tries to join in and believes that he can take part like us. He gets carried away, has a great deal of fun and yet has no knowledge at all of these sports, except through the ears. On open ground, where he can use his spurs, somebody shouts, ‘There goes a hare.’ Then somebody says, ‘Look, the hare has been caught.’ You will see him as proud of the kill as other men he has heard.

At tennis he takes the ball in his left hand and hits it with his racket. As
for the harquebus, he shoots at random, and is delighted when his men tell him he has shot too high or too wide.

How do we know that the whole human race is not doing something just as silly? We may all lack some sense or other; because of that defect, most of the features of objects may be concealed from us. How can we know that the difficulties we have in understanding many of the works of Nature do not derive from this, or that several of the actions of animals which exceed our powers of understanding are produced by a sense-faculty which we do not possess? Perhaps some of them, by such means, enjoy a fuller life, a more complete life than we do.

We need virtually all our senses merely to recognize an apple: we recognize redness in it, sheen, smell and sweetness. An apple may well have other qualities than that: for example powers of desiccation or astringency, for which we have no corresponding senses.
⁴²⁶

Take what we call the occult properties of many objects (such as the magnet attracting iron).
⁴²⁷
Is it not likely that there are certain senses known to Nature which furnish the faculties necessary for perceiving them and understanding them, and that the lack of such faculties entails our ignorance of their true essence? There may be some peculiar sense which tells cocks when it is midday or midnight and makes them crow, [C] or which teaches hens (before any practical experience) to fear the sparrow-hawk but not larger animals like geese or peacocks; which warns chickens of the innate hostility of cats but tells them not to fear dogs; which puts them on their guard against a
miaou
(quite a pleasing sound, really) but not against a bark (a harsh and aggressive sound);
⁴²⁸
which tells hornets, ants and rats how to select the best cheese and the best pear, before they even taste them; [A] which leads stags [C] elephants and snakes [A] to recognize herbs necessary to cure them.

There is no sense which is not dominant and which does not have the means of contributing vast amounts of knowledge. If we had no comprehension of sounds, harmony and the spoken word, that would throw all the rest of our knowledge into inconceivable confusion. For, quite apart from all that arises from the properties of each individual sense, think of the
arguments, consequences and conclusions which we infer by comparing one sense with another. Let an intelligent man imagine human nature created, from the beginning, without sight; let him reflect how much ignorance and confusion such a defect would entail, how much darkness and blindness there would be in our minds. We can see from that how vital it would be for our knowledge of truth if we lacked another sense, or two or three senses. We have fashioned a truth by questioning our five senses working together; but perhaps we need to harmonize the contributions of eight or ten senses if we are ever to know, with certainty, what Truth is in essence.

Those schools which attack Man’s claim to possess knowledge base themselves mainly on the fallibility and weakness of our senses: for, since all knowledge comes to us through them and by them, we have nothing left to hold on to if they fail in their reports to us, if they change and corrupt what they convey to us from outside, or if the light which filters through to our mind from them is darkened in the process.

This ultimate difficulty has given rise to many strange notions: that a given object does have all the qualities we find in it; that it has none of the qualities which we think we find in it;
⁴²⁹
or, as the Epicureans contend, that the Sun is no bigger than our sight judges it to be –

[B]
Quicquid id est, nihilo fertur majore figura
Quam nostris oculis quam cernimus, esse videtur

[Be that as it may, its size is no bigger than it seems when we behold it]
⁴³⁰

[A] – or, that those appearances which make an object look big when you are close to it and smaller when you are farther from it, are both true –

[B]
Nec tamen hic oculis falli concedimus hilum
Proinde animi vitium hoc oculis adfingere noli

[We do not at all concede that the eyes can be deceived. Do not attribute to the eyes the errors of the mind]
⁴³¹

[A] – or, conclusively, that there is no deception whatsoever in our senses, so that we must throw ourselves on their mercy and seek elsewhere the justification for any differences and contradictions which we find in them: that, indeed, we should invent some lie or raving lunacy (yes, they get as far as that!) rather than condemn our senses.

[C] Timagoras said that he did not really see the candle-flame double when he squeezed his eye-ball sideways, but that this appearance arose from a defect of opinion not of vision.
⁴³²
[A] The absurdest of all absurdities [C] for Epicureans [A] is to deny [C] the effective power of [A] the senses:

Proinde quod in quoque est his visum tempore, verum est
.
Et, si non potuit ratio dissolvere causam
,
Cur ea quae fuerint juxtim quadrata, procul sint
Visa rotunda, tamen praestat rationis egentem
Reddere mendose causas utriusque figurae
,
Quam manibus manifesta suis emittere quoquam
,
Et violare fidem primam, et convellere tota
Fundamenta quibus nixatur vita salusque
.
Non modo enim ratio ruat omnis, vita quoque ipsa
Concidat extemplo, nisi credere sensibus ausis
,
Praecipitesque locos vitare, et caetera quae sint
In genere hoc fugienda
.

[Consequently, whatever, at any time, has seemed to the senses to be true, is in fact true. If reason cannot unravel the causes which explain why things that are square when you are close to them appear round at a distance, it is better to find some untrue explanation of these two different impressions than to let the evidence of our senses slip through our fingers, violate first principles and shake the foundations on which our lives and their preservation are built. For, if we could no longer trust our senses and so avoid the giddy heights and other dangers Man must shun, not only would our Reason collapse in ruins but our lives as well.]
⁴³³

[C] That is a counsel of despair. It is quite unphilosophical. It reveals that human knowledge can only be supported by an unreasonable Reason, by mad lunatic ravings; that, if Man is to make himself worth anything, it is better to exploit ‘Reason’ such as this or any other remedy, no matter how
fantastic it may be, rather than to admit so unflattering a truth that he is, of necessity, as stupid as a beast. Man cannot avoid the fact that his senses are both the sovereign regents of his knowledge, and yet, in all circumstances, uncertain and fallible. So here they must fight to a finish; if legitimate weapons fail us – and they do – they must use stubbornness, foolhardiness or cheek!

[B] Should what the Epicureans say be true (namely, that if the senses play us false we have no knowledge at all);
⁴³⁴
and should what the Stoics say be equally true (that sensible appearances are so deceptive that they can give rise in us to no knowledge whatever); then we are forced to conclude, at the expense of the two great schools of Dogmatists, that there is no such thing as knowledge.

[A] Anybody can provide as many examples as he pleases of the ways our senses deceive or cheat us, since so many of their faults or deceptions are quite banal: a trumpet sounds a league behind us, but an echo in a valley may make it seem to come from in front:

[B]
Extantesque procul medio de gurgite montes
Iidem apparent longe diversi licet
Et fugere ad puppim colles campique videntur
Quos agimus propter navim
ubi in medio nobis equus acer obhaesit
Flumine, equi corpus transversum ferre videtur
Vis, et in adversum flumen contrudere raptim
.

[Distant mountains beetling over the sea may appear as one, yet are in fact many; as we sail along, hills and plains appear to be rushing towards our prow; if we look down when our horse stops in mid-stream, the river seems to be forcing it to go up-stream against the current.]
⁴³⁵

[A] Hold a musket-ball beneath your second finger, with your middle finger entwined over it: you will have to force yourself to admit that there is only one ball, so decidedly do you sense it to be two. We can see every day that our senses have mastery over our reason, forcing it to receive impressions which it knows to be false and judges to be false.