386 ELEMENTS OF SCIENCE 



contradiction, and so reduce us to the idiocy of absolute 

 intellectual paralysis. 



But we all know that we have a body as well as a 

 mind, and that the body has the dimensions before men- 

 tioned,* i.e , is " extended." Similarly we perceive that 

 other bodies are extended also, and we do this not by 

 any process of inference f from sensations arising in us 

 through the influence of objects about us, but by a direct 

 intuition which such sensations occasion. It is not a 

 synthesis of such sensations ; for they continue to exist 

 .separately and can be recognised by the mind as doing so 

 and standing as it were beside the direct perception they 

 have occasioned which persists during the recognition of 

 the sensations which have occasioned it. No mistake 

 can be greater than that of thinking a perception is made 

 up of the feelings which minister to it. Two marbles 

 are objectively two, and can be so perceived, whatever the 

 subjective impressions which have occasioned them. As 

 we lately said, our memory has the power of lifting out 

 of mere subjectivism into a certain knowledge of objective 

 truth. Doubtless our faculties do not enable us to fully 

 understand or know all the properties of bodies. It may 

 well be that we might have additional senses which would 

 reveal more of such properties as we might have a 

 sense which would enable us to perceive the magnetic 

 qualities of bodies. But our perceptions, though inade- 

 quate to tell us all we might know, are not mendacious. 

 We know that bodies exist objectively, and many of their 

 objective conditions of existence, some of which give 

 rise to two very notable abstract ideas, namely, those of 

 .space and time. 



* See ante, p. 381. t See ante, p. 255. 



