Читать книгу Genuine Mediumship; or, The Invisible Powers - Atkinson William Walker - Страница 24

Another writer has drawn an interesting picture, which is based upon a conjecture which is scientifically valid, as follows: "The late Professor James once suggested as a useful exercise for young students a consideration of the changes which would be worked in our ordinary world if the various branches of our receiving instruments happened to exchange duties; if, for instance, we heard all colors, and saw all sounds. All this is less mad than it seems. Music is but an interpretation of certain vibrations undertaken by the ear; and color is but an interpretation of other vibrations undertaken by the eye. Were such an alteration of our senses to take place, the world would still be sending us the same messages, but we should be interpreting them differently. Beauty would still be ours, though speaking in another tongue. The birds' song would then strike our retina as pageant of color; we should see all the magical tones of the wind, hear as a great fugue the repeated and harmonized greens of the forest, the cadences of stormy skies. Did we realize how slight an adjustment of our own organs is needed to initiate us into such a world, we should perhaps be less contemptuous of those mystics who tell us in moments of transcendental consciousness they 'heard flowers that sounded, and saw notes that shone'; or that they have experienced rare moments of consciousness in which the senses were fused organs is needed to initiate us into such a world into a single and ineffable act of perception, in which color and sound were known as aspects of the same thing."