Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: THE ORIGIN OF THOUGHT. CHAPTER I. THE SENSES. A Gracious Providence has given to man a brain much larger than that of any other animal in proportion to his size. The brain is simply the mass of matter in the skull with which man knows, fhinks, reasons, etc., just as the bones, tendons and muscles of the arm are a mass of matter by which a weight may be lifted. But as we use the word strength for the exerted or for the potential (latent) power of the arm, so we use the word mind or understanding to indicate the thinking, etc., power of the brain. Now in order to make the mind conscious of the existence of its owner and of the existence of other things outside of himself, the Creator has given to mankind five senses. These senses are the only inlets of knowledge to the mind as Dugald Stewart says in his " Philosophical Essays (I., p. 1), " In speculating concerning any of the intellectual phenomena, it is of essential importance to recollect that our knowledge of the material world is derived entirely from our external senses;" and just in proportion as their number is diminished is thedifficulty increased of communicating knowledge. Take blindness, or the deprivation of one sense. The blind man is much more helpless than the seeing man, and all that the man with sight learns by means of his eyes, the blind man must learn by touch, or by the laborious teaching of another; while there are some things he can never be made to realise, as, for example, differences of colours. Now if to blindness we add congenital deafness in the same individual (he will also be dumb, because never having heard a sound he cannot imitate it), the difficulty of his knowing things outside of himself is still further enormously increased. It is plain, then, that if it were possible to have a c...