II. SENSES
By this inductive method, which develops fundamentally a philosophy of evolution, Herder finds that the senses are a nerve-structure developed to meet the waves of stimulus from without and feeling from within and to differentiate them more finely than did the fibers which worked only in a general way. But the law is the same. The nerves of every sense operate according to the same law by which the fibers contract and expand. The nerves advance to meet pleasant agreeable things, but recede from and resist unpleasant things.
Now Herder observes that something other than the organ of sense and the external objects must operate to produce sensation in at least two of the senses. He sees a certain mental bond without which sight and hearing could not go to the object nor the object to the senses; this common substance, he says, is light, a substance which has the peculiarity of taking just so much from creation as the two end organs can receive. But this light as a medium is a requisite for the finer senses only. There are coarser senses, fibers, and stimuli which cannot be brought into action thus. They can feel only in themselves, for the object must come to them, touch them, and, to a certain extent, be one with them.
Herder is explicit in connecting individual character with the senses. The contribution which each sense makes to the soul cannot with any two human beings be the same in kind, strength, depth, and breadth. There are many proofs of this. Seeing and hearing, which furnish most of the material for thinking, are seldom in one individual with the same degree of training or of natural force. This will not only account for inequalities of the senses evinced in all forms of expression in a single individual, but for such inequalities among groups and races. For, he continues, imaginative power in which thoughts and feelings disport themselves is made of the flowing together of sense impressions.
This is Plato’s thought also when he objects to making knowledge mere sense-perception because it would make a different standard of knowledge for each man. Socrates in Theaetetus quotes Protagoras on the same point: “Sensations are relative and individual.” One scarcely needs to be reminded here of Herder’s thorough acquaintance with Greek philosophy.
The way from a sensation to thought is through the nerve-structure of sense organs, these nerve-structures furnishing just such a medium between the object of sensation on the one hand and thinking and willing on the other, as does light between the object of sense and the visual and auditory organs.
Never losing sight of the physiological element in his psychology, Herder tells us that the soul has grown out of the body, and has so outgrown the body that soul has become the monarch over that, without which soul could not exist. All its thinking grows out of feeling, and this feeling out of a body having in its command manifold obscure forces administered to by variously endowed “servants” and “messengers.”