Page:An analysis of religious belief (1877).djvu/703

 that so emphatically asserted by Berkeley, that the esse of material objects is percipi; that we exhaust the physical phenomenon when we describe its apparent qualities, and need not introduce besides these a material substance to which those qualities are related as its accidents. They are not the accidents, but the actual thing, in so far as it is material. Metaphysical Realism and moderate Idealism are united in the recognition of the truth that the phenomena are not the ultimate realities, and that the qualities of bodies, when analyzed, are subjective, not objective; forms of the human mind, and not independent, external existences.

Hence these various philosophies, like the various religions of which they are in some sort metaphysical parallels, must be considered as preparing the way for the admission of that all-embracing truth which is the common ground of metaphysics and religion.

Examine a simple objective phenomenon. Then you find that you can separate it into all its component qualities: its color, taste, smell, extension, and so forth; and that after all these qualities have been taken into account nothing of the object remains save the vague feeling of an unknown cause by which the whole phenomenon is produced. All the apparent qualities, without exception, are resolvable into modes of consciousness, but the whole object is not so resolvable. For the question still remains, How did we come to have those modes of consciousness? Thus the analysis of the commonest material object leads us straight to an unknowable origin of known manifestations. And each particular phenomenon brings us to the same result. But are we to assume a special Unknowable for each special object? A little consideration will show that the division and subdivision we make of the objects of sensible perception resembles their apparent qualities in being purely subjective, and indeed more than subjective, arbitrary. For I consider an object as one or many, according to the point of view from which I regard it. The glass which I hold in my hand is at this moment one; but the next moment it is shivered into a thousand atoms, and each of these atoms is of complex character, and resolvable into still simpler parts. The planet we inhabit is, for the astronomer, one object; for the geologist