Sight, touch, et al

Usage examples of senses.

Necessary pleasures and all the activity of the senses it will employ only for medicament and assuagement lest its work be impeded.

Thus far we have been meeting those who, on the evidence of thrust and resistance, identify body with real being and find assurance of truth in the phantasms that reach us through the senses, those, in a word, who, like dreamers, take for actualities the figments of their sleeping vision.

The direct way is debarred since it is not easy to point to things actually present in a base and yet leaving that base unaffected: he therefore devises a metaphor for participation without modification, one which supports, also, his thesis that all appearing to the senses is void of substantial existence and that the region of mere seeming is vast.

And how, at this, account for the unity of the knowledge brought in by diverse senses, by eyes, by ears?

And the earth, both in its own interest and in that of beings distinct from itself, might have the experiences of the other senses also--for example, smell and taste where, perhaps, the scent of juices or sap might enter into its care for animal life, as in the constructing or restoring of their bodily part.

We answer, because here and now in all the act and experience of our senses, we are within a unity, and members of it.

In the old, it is significant, the senses are dulled and so is the memory.

Nor does it give the life of perception and sensation, for that looks to the external and to what acts most vigorously upon the senses whereas one accepting that light of truth may be said no longer to see the visible, but the very contrary.

Those of the body would be subdivided according to the senses, some being attributed to sight, others to hearing and taste, others to smell and touch.

It cannot be that other forms of being were produced first and that, these perishing in the absence of the senses, the maker at last supplied the means by which men and other living beings might avert disaster.

We may be told that it lay within the divine knowledge that animal life would be exposed to heat and cold and other such experiences incident to body and that in this knowledge he provided the senses and the organs apt to their activity in order that the living total might not fall an easy prey.

Now, either he gave these organs to souls already possessing the sensitive powers or he gave senses and organs alike.

But surely this is foreseeing, deliberating: are we not back at what was said at the beginning, that God did to this end give both the senses and the powers, however perplexing that giving be?

It is soul, then, that holds the pattern and Reason-Principles of Man, the natural tendencies, the dispositions and powers--all feeble since this is not the Primal Man--and it contains also the Ideal-Forms of other senses, Forms which themselves are senses, bright to all seeming but images, and dim in comparison with those of the earlier order.

We are then apt to say that our senses have been cheated, because we demand as a right that the situation should be an active condition in the ingression.