Page:An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Natural Knowledge.djvu/24

 you not conceive it to be a vast opaque globe, with several unequal risings and valleys?

Alc. I do.

Euph. How can you therefore conclude that the proper object of your sight exists at a distance?

Alc. I confess I do not know.

Euph. For your further conviction, do but consider that crimson cloud. Think you that, if you were in the very place where it is, you would perceive anything like what you now see?

Alc. By no means. I should perceive only a dark mist.

Euph. Is it not plain, therefore, that neither the castle, the planet, nor the cloud, which you see here, are those real ones which you suppose exist at a distance?”

3.3 Now the difficulty to be faced is just this. We may not lightly abandon the castle, the planet, and the crimson cloud, and hope to retain the eye, its retina, and the brain. Such a philosophy is too simple-minded — or at least might be thought so, except for its wide diffusion.

Suppose we make a clean sweep. Science then becomes a formula for calculating mental ‘phenomena’ or ‘impressions.’ But where is science? In books? But the castle and the planet took their libraries with them.

No, science is in the minds of men. But men sleep and forget, and at their best in any one moment of insight entertain but scanty thoughts. Science therefore is nothing but a confident expectation that relevant thoughts will occasionally occur. But by the bye, what has happened to time and space? They must have gone after the other things. No, we must distinguish: space has gone, of course; but time remains as relating the succession of phenomena. Yet this won’t do; for this succession is only known by recollection, and recollection