Science Quote by Johannes P. Muller

Muller is doing something quietly radical here: shrinking the mystery of “new senses” down to the mechanics of experience. He’s not chasing spooky extrasensory perception or hidden forces in the world; he’s insisting that a genuinely new sense would be defined by a new qualia, a distinct kind of feeling, not by access to some exotic external object. That’s a scientist’s demystification with philosophical bite.

The intent sits inside 19th-century physiology’s big pivot: sensation isn’t a transparent window onto reality, it’s the nervous system translating causes into a particular internal language. Muller’s famous doctrine of “specific nerve energies” hovers behind the line: stimulate the optic nerve and you get “light,” even if the stimulus is pressure or electricity. The world doesn’t deliver “redness” prepackaged; the body manufactures it. So a “new sense” would require a new channel with its own signature output, not merely heightened sensitivity or novel stimuli.

The subtext is a boundary-setting move. Muller is policing what counts as scientific novelty: not anecdotes about imperceptible influences, but a demonstrable, repeatable sensory category. It’s also a warning about epistemic humility. If all sensation is modality-specific translation, then our five senses don’t map the world so much as carve it into usable human formats. The quote reads like an early blueprint for later debates in neuroscience and philosophy of mind: perception as construction, and reality as something we never access except through the interface we’re built with.