308 CRITIQUES AND ADDRESSES. [sn. 



only grudgingly, and as it were against his will, that 

 Berkeley admits that we obtain ideas of extension, 

 figure, and magnitude by pure vision, and that he 

 more than half retracts the admission ; while he abso- 

 lutely denies that sight gives us any notion of outness 

 in either sense of the word, and even declares that "no 

 proper visual idea appears to be without the mind, or at 

 any distance off." By "proper visual ideas," Berkeley 

 denotes colours, and light, and shade ; and, therefore, he 

 affirms that colours do not appear to be at any distance 

 from us. I confess that this assertion appears to me to 

 be utterly unaccountable. I have made endless experi- 

 ments on this point, and by no eifort of the imagination 

 can I persuade myself, when looking at a colour, that 

 the colour is in my mind, and not at a " distance off/' 

 though of course I know perfectly well, as a matter of 

 reason, that colour is subjective. It is like looking at the 

 sun setting, and trying to persuade oneself that the earth 

 appears to move and not the sun, a feat I have never 

 been able to accomplish. Even when the eyes are shut, 

 the darkness of which one is conscious, carries with it 

 the notion of outness. One looks, so to speak, into a 

 dark space. Common language expresses the common 

 experience of mankind in this matter. A man will say 

 that a smell is in his nose, a taste in his mouth, a singing 

 in his ears, a creeping or a warmth in his skin ; but if he 

 is jaundiced, he does not say that he has yellow in his 

 eyes, but that everything looks yellow; and if he is 

 troubled with muscce volitantes, he says, not that he has 

 specks in his eyes, but that he sees specks dancing before 

 his eyes. In fact, it appears to me that it is the special 

 peculiarity of visual sensations, that they invariably give 

 rise to the idea of remoteness, and that Berkeley's dictum 

 ought to be reversed. For I think that anyone who 

 interrogates his consciousness carefully will find that 



