Hume : with helps to the study of Berkeley : essays / by Thomas H. Huxley.

Date:
1894
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Hume : with helps to the study of Berkeley : essays / by Thomas H. Huxley. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

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    dent to convince one that the smell, and the teste, and the yellowness, of which we become aware when an orange is smelt, tasted, and seen, are as completely states of our consciousness as is the pain which arises if the orange happens to be too sour. Nor is it less clear that every sound is a state of the consciousness of him who hears it. If the universe contained only blind and deaf beings, it is impossible for us to imagine but that darkness and silence should reign everywhere. It is undoubtedly true, then, of all the simple sensations that, as Berkeley says, their “esse is percipi ”—their being is to be “ perceived or known.” But that which perceives, or knows, is termed mind or spirit; and therefore the know- ledge which the senses give us is, after all, a know- ledge of spiritual phenomena. All this was explicitly or implicitly admitted, and, indeed, insisted upon, by Berkeley’s contem- poraries, and by no one more strongly than by Locke, who terms smells, tastes, colours, sounds, and the like, “ secondary qualities,” and observes, with respect to these “ secondary qualities,” that “whatever reality Ave by mistake attribute to them [they] are in truth nothing in the objects themselves.” And again: “ Flame is denominated hot and light; snow, white and cold ; and manna, white and sweet, from the ideas they produce in us; which qualities are commonly thought to be the