56 LESSONS FROM NATURE. [CHAP. III. 



the metaphysical \vriters most popularly known in England, 

 prevalent suck as, G.*?., Berkeley, Hume, Mill, Bain, Spencer, 

 onth^ub- &c., &c. Starting with the conception that the 

 modera ^-* obiects immediately known are sensations, and 



losophers, . i J j. 1 



ami its cause, that the objects of perception are but mediately 

 known by inference from such sensations, they have, with 

 more or less accord, naturally arrived at the conclusion 

 that as inferences are liable to error there can be no 

 certain truth but in feelings. Yet examination of that 

 which self-consciousness tells us takes place in onr own 

 minds shows that when we look at anything, as, e.g., at a 

 tree, we do not perceive sensations, and infer from them 

 that we have before us a single, solid, enduring object 

 of a certain shape and colour which we call a tree ; but 

 that our intellect at once and instantaneously in the very 

 act of feeling immediately and directly perceives the tree 

 itself. This is what my mind declares to me to be here 

 and now the case. It says that it does not perceive an 

 image of the tree, either in the eye or elsewhere ; that 

 the tree is not presented to it by any intermediate agency 

 whatever, but that the mind, in the act of sensation, di 

 rectly makes the very tree itself present before it, while 

 at the same time it equally declares that the sensations 

 themselves are not the tree but are caused by the action of 

 my sensitive nature (my various organs of sense) and the 

 tree perceived. 



It must be borne in mind that in our inquiry we are 

 compelled to start from subjectivity, and that our supreme 

 test is what the rnind declares here and now to be its clear, 

 positive, and absolute conviction. Appeals, then, from that 

 conviction to the infant mind, or to theoretical notions as to 

 the development of reason, are quite out of court. Never 

 theless, lest we should seem to shirk a familiar objection, 

 we may here note that as soon as the infant s mind knows 

 colours, smells, shapes, &c., it also knows the coloured, 

 odorous, extended objects themselves. Even the infant never 

 infers from sensations to objects, its intellect recognises the 



