Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 15.djvu/105

 but those of smell and hearing, we should be unable to conceive a material substance. We might have a conception of time, but could have none of extension, or of resistance, or of motion. And without the three latter conceptions no idea of matter could be formed. Our whole knowledge would be limited to that of a shifting succession of immaterial phenomena. But, if an immaterial substance may exist, it may have any conceivable properties; and sensation may be one of them. All these propositions may be affirmed with complete dialectic safety, inasmuch as they can not possibly be disproved; but neither can a particle of demonstrative evidence be offered in favor of them.

As regards the second hypothesis, it certainly is not inconceivable, and therefore it may be true, that sensation is the direct effect of certain kinds of bodily motion. It is just as easy to suppose this as to suppose, on. the former hypothesis, that bodily motion affects an immaterial substance. But neither is it susceptible of proof.

And, as to the third hypothesis, since the logic of induction is in no case competent to prove that events apparently standing in the relation of cause and effect may not both be effects of a common cause—that also is as safe from refutation, if as incapable of demonstration, as the other two.

In my own opinion, neither of these speculations can be regarded seriously as anything but a more or less convenient working hypothesis. But, if I must choose among them, I take the "law of parcimony" for my guide, and select the simplest—namely, that the sensation is the direct effect of the mode of motion of the sensorium. It may justly be said that this is not the slightest explanation of sensation; but then am I really any the wiser, if I say that a sensation is an activity (of which I know nothing) of a substance of mind (of which also I know nothing)? Or, if I say that the Deity causes the sensation to arise in my mind immediately after he has caused the particles of the sensorium to move in a certain way, is anything gained? In truth, a sensation, as we have already seen, is an intuition—a part of immediate knowledge. As such it is an ultimate fact and inexplicable; and all that we can hope to find out about it, and that indeed is worth finding out, is its relation to other natural facts. That relation appears to me to be sufficiently expressed, for all practical purposes, by saying that sensation is the invariable consequent of certain changes in the sensorium—or, in other words, that, so far as we know, the change in the sensorium is the cause of the sensation.

I permit myself to imagine that the untutored, if noble, savage of common sense who has been misled into reading thus far by the hope of getting positive solid information about sensation, giving way to not unnatural irritation, may here interpellate: "The upshot of all this long disquisition is, that we are profoundly ignorant. We knew that to begin with, and you have merely furnished another example of the emptiness and uselessness of metaphysics." But I venture to reply,