THE REPRESENTATIVE THEORY OF IDEAS 63 



ideas the possibility of perception under supposed circumstances 

 may be startling to common sense, but there is nothing in it 

 to baffle scientific acceptance. 



There is, however, a very simple objection, which neither the 

 subjective idealism of Berkeley nor Hume s modification of it 

 can successfully meet, and which did much to block the further 

 development of English empiricism during a full century. How 

 can things be identified with perceptions, when the same thing 

 can be perceived in so many ways and from so many different 

 points of view? It is not as if the various impressions thus 

 received were fused into a single image as color and texture 

 unite in the perception of a rose-leaf. They may be in the 

 highest degree incompatible and mutually exclusive, as well as 

 extremely different from each other. Yet they remain percep 

 tions of the same thing. Neither Hume nor Berkeley can offer 

 any explanation except the denial of the fact. So long as the 

 perception and the thing remain identical, a one-to-many relation 

 between them is a manifest absurdity. The device of getting 

 rid of epistemological dualism by equating one side of the division 

 with a portion of the other side will not suffice. 



In conclusion, we wish to remark that, while Berkeley and 

 Hume denounce the representative theory, they in effect fall 

 back upon its very crudest form for the conception of the relation 

 between idea and ideatum. They regard it as necessarily a re 

 semblance, and contemplate no other possibility. This is why, 

 for example, the possibility of an idea of a spirit is rejected by 

 Berkeley. The passive idea and the active spirit are so utterly 

 unlike, that no possible bond of resemblance between them can 

 subsist. This attitude on their part may be thought the more 

 remarkable, as their investigations into general ideas had famil 

 iarized them with an altogether different type of representation, 

 that of ideas by w^ords; and Berkeley had particularly noted 

 the analogy between the signification of words and the visual 

 perception of distance. The strain of eye-convergence means 



