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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    “ Inquiry,” of seventeen years’ later date.^ Even Sir William Hamilton, learned historian and acute critic as lie was, not only failed to appre- hend the philosophical bearing of long-established physiological truths ; but, when he affirmed that there is no reason to deny that the mind feels at the finger points, and none to assert that the brain is the sole organ of thought,^ he showed that he had not apprehended the significance of the revolution commenced, two hundred years before his time, by Descartes, and effectively followed up by Haller, Hartley, and Bonnet, in the middle of the last century. In truth, the theory of sensation, except in one ^ In justice to Reid, however, it should be stated that the chapters on sensation in the Essays on the Intellectual Powers (1785) exhibit a great improvement. He is, in fact, in advance of his commentator, as the note to Essay II. chap. ii. p. 248 of Hamilton’s edition shows. ^ Haller, amplifying Descartes, writes in the Primce Lirum, CCCLXVI.—“Non est adeo obscurum sensum omnem oriri ab objecti sensibilis impressione in nervum quemcumque corporis humani, et eamdem per eum nervum ad cerebrum pervenientem tunc demum representari animaj, quando cerebrum adtigit. Ut etiam hoc falsum sit animam iuproximo per sensoria nervor- umque ramos sentire.” . . . dlvii.—“Dum ergo sentimus quinque diversissima entia conjunguntur : corpus quod sentimus: organi sensorii adfectio ab eo corpora : cerebri adfectio a sensorii percussione nata : in anima nata mutatio : animae denique con- scientia et sensationis adperceptio.” Nevertheless, Sir William Hamilton gravely informs his hearers:—“We have no more right to deny that the mind feels at the finger ]x>ints, as con- sciousness assures us, than to assert that it thinks exclusively iu the brain.”—Lecture on Metaphysics and Logic, ii. p. 128. “We have no reason whatever to doubt the report of conscious- ness, that we actually perceive at the external point of sensa- tion, and that we perceive the material reality.”—Ibid. j). 129.