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Somewhere between the retina of the eye, with its magic web of sensitive nerve ends, and the proper registering and transforming regions of the brain something happens about which Science can say no final word. What happens in the case of light is equally true of sound and tactual sensation.
This part of the process of filling in, which is the most instantaneous, automatic, and unconscious, may be supposed to answer to the most constant and therefore the most deeply organized connections of experience; for, speaking generally, we never have an impression of colour, except when there are circumstances present which are fitted to yield us those simple muscular and tactual experiences through which the ideas of a particular form, size, etc., are pretty certainly obtained.
However little we may relish this distinction between "aristocratic" and vulgar belief; however strongly we may hold that best knowledge of God that, namely, which is experimental and tactual rather than intellectual or imaginative is equally accessible to all; yet just so far as there is question of the intellectual and imaginative forms in which the faith is apprehended, the distinction does and must exist, not only in religion but in every department of belief, as long as there are different levels of culture in the same body of believers.
Diderot attempts to solve the problem by maintaining that tactual sensations occupy an extended space which the blind in thought can add to or contract, and in this way equip himself with spatial conceptions. There would, on this view, as M. Villey remarks, be a complete heterogeneity between the imagination of the blind and that of the vident. M. Villey denies this altogether.
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