Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 3 "Philosophical Remains" (1883 ed.).djvu/339

Rh or eyebrows. But, in truth, we are maintaining no position so completely at variance with the fact, and we are requiring of them no such extravagant and impossible belief. As well might they conceive that we are inclined to maintain that the chairs are not seen to be external to the table. Now, on the contrary, we hold it to be an undeniable fact (and so does Berkeley), that all visible objects are seen to be external, and at a distance from one another; that objects at the end of the street, or at the end of the great ranges of astronomy, are all seen to be very far removed from the visible features of our own faces; but we deny that these objects, and our own noses among the number, are seen to be external, or at any distance at all from our own sight; simply for this reason, that our sight is unable to see itself. How can we see a thing to be at any distance whatsoever from a thing which we don't see? Suppose a person were privately to bury a guinea somewhere, and then, pointing to St Paul's, were to ask a friend, How far is my guinea buried from that cathedral? What judgment could the person so interrogated form—what answer could he give? obviously none. The guinea might be buried under St Paul's foundation—it might be buried at Timbuctoo. There are no data furnished, from which a judgment may be formed, and a reply given. In the same way, with regard to sight and its objects; the requisite data for a judgment are not supplied to this sense. One datum is given, the visible object; but the other necessary