Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 3 "Philosophical Remains" (1883 ed.).djvu/346

336 seen as external to the eye, does, in the absence of a tangible or touched rose, suggest a tangible or touched rose as an object external to the eye. "But," says Mr Bailey, "this comparison completely fails. To make it tally, we must suppose that the audible name, by suggesting the visible flower, becomes itself a visible object." What! does he then suppose that Berkeley holds that the visible flower, by suggesting the tangible flower, becomes itself a tangible object? To make Mr Bailey's objection tell, Berkeley must be represented as holding this monstrous opinion, which he most assuredly never did.

Our limits prevent us from following either Berkeley or his reviewer through the further details of this speculation. But we think that we have pointed out with sufficient distinctness Mr Bailey's fundamental blunder, upon which the whole of his supposed refutation of Berkeley is built, and which consists in this: that he conceives the Bishop to maintain that the perception of visible outness, or the distance of objects among themselves, is as much the result of suggestion as the knowledge of tangible outness, or the distance of objects from the organ of sight. He seems to think Berkeley's doctrine to be this: that our visual sensations are mere internal feelings, in which there is originally and directly no kind of outness at all involved, not even the outness of one visible thing from another visible thing; and that this outness is in some way or other suggested to the mind by these internal feelings. "But," says he,