Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 11.djvu/205

194 in effect, the same and undistinguishable; but still view them in different aspects, according to the resemblances of which they are susceptible. When we would consider only the figure of the globe of white marble, we form in reality an idea both of the figure and colour, but tacitly carry our eye to its resemblance with the globe of black marble: and in the same manner, when we would consider its colour only, we turn our view to its resemblance with the cube of white marble. By this means we accompany our ideas with a kind of reflection, of whiccustom renders us, in a great measure, insensible. A person who desires us to consider the figure of a globeh of white marble without thinking on its colour, desires an impossibility; but his meaning is, that we should consider the colour and figure together, but still keep in our eye the resemblance to the globe of black marble, or that to any other globe of whatever colour or substance." (Treatise of Human Nature, i. 7.)

It is not hard to see that we cannot distinguish in a body figured "many different resemblances and relations," without bringing the resembling elements in some sense singly into thought: if the mental complex which we call an object were an indissoluble unit, we might affirm a general likeness or unlikeness between it and other objects, but we could not affirm that the resemblance lay in the figure, or colour. If, as Hume asserts, the figure and colour "are, in effect, the same and undistinguishable," why do we find the one susceptible of the one class of resemblances, and the other of another class? If we take the words literally, should not the figure, viewed in one aspect, be susceptible of resemblances of figure, and viewed in another, of colour? And similarly, if the colour is one with the figure the same and undistinguishable, should not the colour, viewed in one aspect, be susceptible of resemblances of colour, and viewed in another, of figure? Hume's admission that the two elements are known as giving different resemblances in itself refutes his previous assertion that they are undistinguishable. If colour be recognised as like colour, and figure like figure, the two qualities are distinguished as different, and are in reality separately grasped.

I will now take a passage from J. S. Mill's Examination of Sir William Hamilton's Philosophy (c. xvii.):

"The formation, therefore, of a Concept, does not consist in separating the attributes which arc said to compose it, from all other attributes of the same object, and enabling us to conceive those attributes, disjoined from any others. We neither conceive them, nor think them, nor cognise them in any way as a thing apart, but solely as forming, in combination with numerous other attributes, the idea of an individual object. But, though thinking them only as part of a larger agglomeration, we have the power of fixing our attention on them, to the neglect of the other attributes with which we think them combined. While the concentration of attention actually lasts, if it is sufficiently intense, we may be temporarily unconscious of any of the other attributes, and may really, for a brief interval, have nothing present to our mind but the attributes constituent to the