76 NAMES AND PROPOSITIONS. 



follows : if we take an orange, and conceive it to be 

 divested of its natural colour 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 pro- 

 perties, and acquire no new ones ; to become, in short, 

 invisible, intangible, and imperceptible not only by all 

 our senses, but by the senses of all other sentient 

 beings, real or possible ; nothing, say these philo- 

 sophers, 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 sensations 

 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 we have it in our power to experience them. 

 But a fixed law of connexion, making the sensations 

 occur together, does not, say these philosophers, 

 necessarily require what is called a substratum to 

 support them. The conception of a substratum is 

 but one of many possible forms in which that con- 

 nexion presents itself to our imagination ; a mode of, 

 as it were, realizing the idea. If there be such a 

 substratum, suppose it this instant annihilated by the 

 fiat of Omnipotence, and let the sensations continue 

 to occur in the same order, and how would the 

 substratum be missed ? By what signs should we be 

 able to discover that its existence had terminated? 



