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64 THE FOURFOLD BOOT. [CHAP. IV.
muscular power, which enables it to know the weight,
solidity, toughness,
the least possible liability to error.
or brittleness of bodies : all this with
These data nevertheless do not by any means yet give
perception, which is always the work of the Understanding,
The sensation I have in pressing against a table with niy
hand, contains no representation of a firm cohesion of parts
in that object, nor indeed anything at all like it. It is
only when my Understanding passes from that sensation
to its cause, that the intellect constructs for itself a body
having the properties of solidity, impenetrability, and hard
ness. If in the dark, I put my hand upon a flat surface,
or lay hold of a ball of about three inches in diameter,
the same parts of my hand feel the pressure in both cases ;
it is only by the different position which my hand takes
that, in the one or in the other case, my Understanding
constructs the shape of the body whose contact is the cause
of the sensation, for which it receives confirmation from the
changes of position which I make. The sensations in the
hand of a man born blind, on feeling an object of cubic shape,
are quite uniform and the same on all sides and in every
direction : the edges, it is true, press upon a smaller portion
of his hand, still nothing at all like a cube is contained in
these sensations. His Understanding, however, draws the
immediate and intuitive conclusion from the resistance
felt, that this resistance must have a cause, which then
presents itself through that conclusion as a hard body ;
and through the movements of his arms in feeling the
object, while the hand s sensation remains unaltered, he
constructs the cubic shape in Space, which is known to
him a priori. If the representation of a cause and of
Space, together with their laws, had not already existed
within him, the image of a cube could never have proceeded
from those successive sensations in his hand. If a rope be
drawn through his hand, he will construct, as the cause of