CONSCIOUSNESS ,AND ITS POWERS. 15 



and Plato accused the materialists of refusing to believe 

 in anything they could not handle with their hands ; but 

 this is even more than what was true of their philosophy, 

 and less than discriminative in judging it. They 

 evidently did not believe or allow for feeling or con- 

 sciousness in the hand, but falsely assumed that the 

 whole of the hand's function or consciousness of touch 

 was material and apparent, and nothing more than what 

 they saw of the hand with their eyes. But while they 

 saw physical contact with the hand, they never saw 

 feeling or the consciousness of touch in it, and they 

 therefore drew a conclusion as to touch at variance with 

 the sense of touch itself, and with the evidence of every 

 other faculty of man but his eyesight. 



Berkeley, on the other hand, refuted their proposition 

 not absolutely or directly, but only by implication and 

 without really perceiving what was necessary to do it. 

 His proposition that tlie sense of touch is not material 

 implies the refutation, but this element of his proposition 

 he himself expelled from it by gratuitously assuming 

 that the existence of matter could not be demonstrated, 

 and that there was, therefore, nothing for the sense to touch. 

 From want of logical discrimination to state the third 

 proposition (p. 9, ante), he not only did not refute the 

 Epicureans, but left himself without a correct basis for 

 further logical progress, and went off into all the errors 

 of his subsequent fallacious and inconsecutive philosophy. 

 Had he perceived that the sense of touch, though not 

 material, touches is a sense of touch, and must therefore 

 have something to touch before it is sensible of touching 

 he would not only have refuted the Epicureans in direct 

 terms by showing that something besides matter can 

 touch and be touched, but he would also have avoided 

 the blunder that matter is intangible and cannot be 

 demonstrated, and all the errors he, and Hume after him, 



