Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 3 "Philosophical Remains" (1883 ed.).djvu/338

328 outness of them all in relation to each other; but you can predicate nothing of the sort with regard to any of them in relation to your eye or to your mind, for you have no colour of your eye or mind before you with which you can compare them, and out of which, in virtue of that comparison, you can say that they visibly exist. Doubtless, if you saw the colour of your own eye, you could then say that other visible objects, that is, other colours, were seen to be external to it. But, as you never see this, you have nothing left for it but even now to accept the fact as Berkeley laid it down, coupled with the reasoning by which we have endeavoured to explain and expiscate it. But the touch! Does not the touch enable us to form a judgment with respect to the outness of objects from the eye? Undoubtedly it does—as Berkeley everywhere contends. But the only question at present at issue is, Does the sight?—and the fact established beyond all question by the foregoing reasoning is, that it does not.

What makes people so reluctant and unwilling to accept this fact is, that they suppose we are requiring them to believe that visible objects, that is, colours, are not seen to be external to their own visible bodies; that, for instance, a colour, at the other end of the room, is not seen to be external to their hand, or the point of their own nose. They think that when such a colour is said not to be seen to be external to the eye, that we are maintaining that they must see it to be in close proximity to their own visible nose