FALLACIES OF CONFUSION. 451 



It is briefly as follows. I thought of a thing yester- 

 day ; I ceased to think of it ; I think of it again 

 to-day. I had, therefore, in my mind yesterday an 

 idea of the object ; I have also an idea of it to-da^ : 

 this idea is evidently not another, but the very same 

 idea. Yet an intervening time elapsed in which I had 

 it not. Where was the idea during this interval ? It 

 must have been somewhere ; it did not cease to exist ; 

 otherwise the idea I had yesterday could not be the 

 same idea ; no more than the man I see alive to-day 

 can be the same whom I saw yesterday, if the man 

 has died in the meanwhile. Now an idea cannot 

 be conceived to exist anywhere except in a mind; 

 and hence here must exist an Universal Mind, in 

 which all ideas have their permanent residence, during 

 the intervals of their conscious presence in our own 

 minds. 



That Berkeley here confounded sameness numero 

 with sameness specie, that is, with exact resemblance, 

 and assumed the former when there was only the 

 latter, hardly needs be more particularly pointed out. 

 He could never have broached this strange theory if 

 he had understood, that when we say we have the same 

 thought to-day which we had yesterday, we do not 

 mean the same individual thought, but a thought 

 exactly similar: as we say that we have the same 

 illness which we had last year, meaning only the same 

 sort of illness. 



In one remarkable instance the scientific world 

 was divided into two furiously hostile parties by an 

 ambiguity of language affecting a branch of science 

 which, more completely than most others, enjoys the 

 advantage of a precise and well-defined termino- 

 logy. I refer to the famous dispute respecting the 



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