"He who feels compelled to consider the consequences of these facts cannot but realize that the specific sensibility of nerves for certain impressions is not enough, since all nerves are sensitive to the same cause but react to the same cause in different ways"
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Muller is quietly detonating a commonsense idea: that sensation is a simple matter of the world pressing on our bodies like a stamp on wax. His target is naive realism, the belief that our nerves merely transmit what’s “out there.” If all nerves can be stimulated by the same cause, yet produce different experiences, then the raw stimulus can’t be the whole story. The body isn’t a passive wire; it’s an interpreter with built-in rules.
The intent is methodological as much as philosophical. Mid-19th-century physiology was trying to turn the messy interior of experience into an object of experimental science. Muller’s move is to shift explanatory weight from the external event to the specific organization of the sensory system - what later becomes the doctrine of “specific nerve energies.” The subtext is a warning to his fellow empiricists: you can’t infer reality directly from sensation, because sensation is already a construction. Touch, sight, hearing aren’t different because the world politely sends different kinds of “touch-stuff” or “light-stuff”; they’re different because the nervous system routes and codes stimulation differently.
That’s why the sentence is built like a trap. He starts with “facts” and “consequences,” signaling that this isn’t metaphysical speculation but what the data forces you to admit. Then comes the twist: “all nerves are sensitive to the same cause” undermines any comforting one-to-one mapping between stimulus and perception. The payoff - “react…in different ways” - makes perception look less like a window and more like an instrument panel. In a century intoxicated by measurement, Muller is insisting that measurement begins inside the measurer.
The intent is methodological as much as philosophical. Mid-19th-century physiology was trying to turn the messy interior of experience into an object of experimental science. Muller’s move is to shift explanatory weight from the external event to the specific organization of the sensory system - what later becomes the doctrine of “specific nerve energies.” The subtext is a warning to his fellow empiricists: you can’t infer reality directly from sensation, because sensation is already a construction. Touch, sight, hearing aren’t different because the world politely sends different kinds of “touch-stuff” or “light-stuff”; they’re different because the nervous system routes and codes stimulation differently.
That’s why the sentence is built like a trap. He starts with “facts” and “consequences,” signaling that this isn’t metaphysical speculation but what the data forces you to admit. Then comes the twist: “all nerves are sensitive to the same cause” undermines any comforting one-to-one mapping between stimulus and perception. The payoff - “react…in different ways” - makes perception look less like a window and more like an instrument panel. In a century intoxicated by measurement, Muller is insisting that measurement begins inside the measurer.
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| Topic | Science |
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