Page:Philosophical Review Volume 14.djvu/49

33 which is vividly perceived. This being the case, it follows that the only way in which we can prove the apparently objective qualities of things to be subjective, is by showing that they are inseparably bound up with the admittedly subjective phenomena of feeling-tone. If this latter supposition could be proved, idealism would be established, and 'being perceived' would have to be admitted as a sine qua non of 'existing.' To the present writer the argument is unconvincing for the reason that his consciousness shows him no such indissoluble connection between the cognitive and the affective processes. Figure and color do not invariably give rise to attitudes of liking and disliking. And when we do find, either on account of their intensities or on account of their harmony or discord, a system of cognitive contents suffused with feeling-tone or emotion, we never think of the existence of the objects as due to our feeling towards them. Our affective attitudes, in short, are felt to be something over and above the objects which excite them. Nor is the validity of this answer to the idealistic argument affected, if we admit that no purely cognitive process is experienced. For, even if some degree of feeling-tone is always found to accompany the experience of objects, we do not estimate the reality of the object by the degree of feeling-tone, nor do we have any difficulty in distinguishing the object from our attitude toward it, and thus in imagining its independent existence. There is, then, so far as I can see, no genuine introspective evidence to support the idealist's attempt to subjectivize objects of sense-perception by entangling them with our feelings of pleasure and pain.

As a matter of fact, neither Hume nor Berkeley lay so much stress upon the argument just considered as upon the less convincing, though more familiar, argument from Relativity. This second argument is stated by Hume as follows. "'Twill first be proper to observe a few of those experiments which convince us, that our perceptions are not possest of any independent existence. When we press one eye with a finger, we immediately perceive all the objects to become double, and one-half of them to be removed from their common and natural position. But as we do not attribute a continu'd existence to both these perceptions, and