Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 3 "Philosophical Remains" (1883 ed.).djvu/341

Rh his mind." External even to his body! Surely Mr Bailey did not expect that the young man was to perceive visible things to be in his visible body. Surely he does not think that the hands of Berkeley's argument would have been strengthened by any such preposterous revelation. Surely he is not such a crude speculator as to imagine that the mind is in the body, like the brain, the liver, or the lungs; and that to bear out Berkeley's theory, it was necessary that the visible universe, of which the visible body is a part, should be seen to be in this mind internal again in its turn to the visible body. Truly this is ravelling the hank of thought with a vengeance.

Berkeley's doctrine with regard to the outness of visible objects, we would state to be this: All these objects are directly seen to be external to each other, but none of them are seen or can be seen, for the reason above given, to be external to the eye itself. He holds that the knowledge that they are external to the eye—that they possess a real and tangible outness independent of the sight—is entirely brought about by the operation of another sense—the sense of touch. He further maintains that the tactual sensations having been repeatedly experienced along with the visual sensations, which yield no such judgment, these visual sensations come at length of themselves, and in the absence of the tactual impressions, to suggest objects as external to the eye, that is, as endowed with real and tangible outness; and so perfect is the association, that the seer seems to originate out of