Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 12.djvu/458

 whatever has the one has also the other: it asserts that ‘being’ and ‘being experienced’ are necessarily connected: that whatever is is also experienced. And this, I admit, cannot be directly refuted. But I believe it to be false; and I have asserted that anybody who saw that ‘esse and percipi’ were as distinct as ‘green’ and ‘sweet’ would be no more ready to believe that whatever is is also experienced, than to believe that whatever is green is also sweet. I have asserted that no one would believe that ‘esse is percipi’ if they saw how different esse is from percipi: but this I shall not try to prove. I have asserted that all who do believe that ‘esse is percipi’ identify with it or take as a reason for it a self-contradictory proposition: but this I shall not try to prove. I shall only try to show that certain propositions which I assert to be believed, are false. That they are believed, and that without this belief ‘esse is percipi’ would not be believed either, I must leave without a proof.

I pass, then, from the uninteresting question ‘Is esse percipi?’ to the still more uninteresting and apparently irrelevant question ‘What is a sensation or idea?’

We all know that the sensation of blue differs from that of green. But it is plain that if both are sensations they also have some point in common. What is it that they have in common? And how is this common element related to the points in which they differ?

I will call the common element ‘consciousness’ without yet attempting to say what the thing I so call is. We have then in every sensation two distinct terms, (1) ‘consciousness,’ in respect of which all sensations are alike; and (2) something else, in respect of which one sensation differs from another. It will be convenient if I may be allowed to call this second term the ‘object’ of a sensation: this also without yet attempting to say what I mean by the word.

We have then in every sensation two distinct elements, one which I call consciousness, and another which I call the object of consciousness. This must be so if the sensation of blue and the sensation of green, though different in one respect, are alike in another: blue is one object of sensation and green is another, and consciousness, which both sensations have in common, is different from either.

But, further, sometimes the sensation of blue exists in my mind and sometimes it does not; and knowing, as we now do, that the sensation of blue includes two different elements, namely consciousness and blue, the question arises whether, when the sensation of blue exists, it is the consciousness which exists, or the blue which exists, or both. And one