Science Quote by Johannes P. Muller

Muller is picking a fight with a tempting story: that seeing is basically training, or worse, wishful thinking. In the 19th century, when psychology and philosophy still jostled with physiology over who got to explain perception, that kind of story was attractive. If the mind can “habituate” the eyes into agreement, then binocular vision becomes a triumph of experience and mental correction. Muller calls it “exceedingly improbable” because he’s trying to move perception out of the salon and into the lab.

The line is technical, but the intent is political in a scientific sense: defend the autonomy of the sensory apparatus. “Identical action of the corresponding parts of the two retina” points to the puzzle of why two separate images don’t usually feel like two worlds. His wager is that the coordination is not an after-the-fact psychological patch; it’s built into the system, anchored in anatomy and neural wiring. That’s classic Muller: not denying the mind, but refusing to let it be a convenient explanation that can’t be falsified.

The subtext is a warning against smuggling metaphysics into biology. “Influence of the mind” reads like a polite jab at theories that let consciousness do the heavy lifting whenever mechanisms are unclear. Muller’s broader project (including his work on the specific energies of nerves) insisted that perception is constrained by the body’s channels. You don’t see reality raw; you see what your physiology can transmit. This sentence is him drawing that boundary with a scalpel.