Page 181 - Allah is Known through Reason

eaten the cake in their minds and are satiated; both Johnson and the sec-

ond person have fully experienced the moment of striking the stone in
their minds.
Let us make a change in the example we gave about Politzer: let us con-
nect the nerves of the man hit by the bus to Politzer's brain, and the nerves
of Politzer sitting in his house to the brain of the man who is hit by the
bus. In this case, Politzer will think that a bus has hit him although he is
sitting in his house. The man actually hit by the bus will never feel the
impact of the accident and think that he is sitting in Politzer's house. The
very same logic may be applied to the cake and the stone examples.
As we see, it is not possible for man to transcend his senses and break
free of them. In this respect, a man's soul can be exposed to all kinds of
representations of physical events although it has no physical body and no
material existence and lacks material weight. It is not possible for a person
to realise this because he assumes these three-dimensional images to be
real and is certain of their existence because, like everybody, he depends
on perceptions experienced by his sensory organs.
The famous British philosopher David Hume expresses his thoughts on
this fact:

Frankly speaking, when I include myself in what I call "myself", I always
come across with a specific perception pertaining to hot or cold, light or
shadow, love or hatred, sour or sweet or some other notion. Without the
existence of a perception, I can never capture myself in a particular time and
I can observe nothing but perception. 37

THE FORMATION OF PERCEPTIONS IN THE
BRAIN IS NOT PHILOSOPHY BUT SCIENTIFIC FACT
Materialists claim that what we have been saying here is a philosophi-

cal view. However, to hold that the "external world", as we call it, is a col-
lection of perceptions is not a matter of philosophy but a plain scientific
fact. How the image and feelings form in the brain is taught in medical
schools in detail. These facts, proven by 20th-century science particularly
physics, clearly show that matter does not have an absolute reality and

A Very Different Approach to Matter 181