THINGS DENOTED BY NAMES. 53 



conscious; but I consider thera as produced by something not only exist- 

 ing independently of my will, but external to my bodily organs and to my 

 mind. This external something I call a body. 



It may be asked, how come Ave to ascribe our sensations to any exter- 

 nal cause? And is there sufficient ground for so ascribing them? It is 

 known, that there are metaphysicians who have raised a controversy on 

 the point; maintaining that we are not warranted in referring our sensa- 

 tions to a cause such as we understand by the word Body, or to any ex- 

 ternal cause whatever. Though we have no concern here with this con- 

 troversy, nor with the metaphysical niceties on which it turns, one of the 

 best ways of showing what is meant by Substance is, to consider what po- 

 sition it is necessary to take up, in order to maintain its existence against 

 opponents. 



It is certain, then, that a part of our notion of a body consists of the 

 notion of a number of sensations of our own, or of other sentient beings, 

 habitually occurring simultaneously. My conception of the table at which 

 I am writing is compounded of its visible form and size, which are com- 

 plex sensations of sight; its tangible form and size, which are complex 

 sensations of our organs of touch and of our muscles; its weight, which 

 is also a sensation of touch and of the muscles ; its color, which is a sensa- 

 tion of sight ; its hardness, which is a sensation of the muscles ; its com- 

 position, which is another word for all the varieties of sensation which we 

 receive under various circumstances from the wood of which it is made, 

 and so forth. All or most of these various sensations frequently are, and, 

 as we learn by experience, always might be, experienced simultaneously, or 

 in many different orders of succession at our own choice: and hence the 

 thought of any one of them makes us think of the others, and the whole 

 becomes mentally amalgamated into one mixed state of consciousness, 

 which, in the language of the school of Locke and Hartley, is termed a 

 Complex Idea. 



Now, there are philosophers who have argued as follows : If we con- 

 ceive an orange to be divested of its natural color without acquiring any 

 new one; to lose its softness without becoming hard, its roundness without 

 becoming square or pentagonal, or of any other regular or irregular figure 

 whatever ; to be deprived of size, of weight, of taste, of smell ; to lose all 

 its mechanical and all its chemical properties, and acquire no new ones ; to 

 become, in short, invisible, intangible, imperceptible not only by all our 

 senses, but by the senses of all other sentient beings, real or possible; 

 nothing, say these thinkers, would remain. For of what nature, they ask, 

 could be the residuum? and by what token could it manifest its presence? 

 To the unreflecting its existence seems to rest on the evidence of the senses. 

 But to the senses nothing is apparent except the sensations. We know, 

 indeed, that these sens:\tions are bound together by some law ; they do not 

 come together at random, but according to a systematic order, which is 

 part of the order established in the universe. When we experience one of 

 these sensations, we usually experience the others also, or know that wo 

 have it in our power to experience them. But a fixed law of connection, 

 making the sensations occur together, does not, say these philosophei's, 

 necessarily require what is called a substratum to support them. The con- 

 ception of a substratum is but one of many possible forms in which that 

 connection presents itself to our imagination ; a mode of, as it were, real- 

 izing the idea. If there be such a substratum, suppose it at this instant 

 miraculously annihilated, and let the sensations continue to occur in the 



