xiii.] THE METAPHYSICS OF SENSATION. 347 



simply as moving towards one another at a certain rate, 

 in which case he only pictures motion to himself, and 

 leaves force aside ; or, that he conceives each particle to 

 be animated by something like his own volition, and to 

 be pulling as he would pull. And I suppose that this 

 difficulty of thinking of force except as something com- 

 parable to volition, lies at the bottom of Leibnitz's 

 doctrine of monads, to say nothing of Schopenhauer's 

 " Welt als Wille und Vorstellung ;" while the opposite 

 difficulty of conceiving force to be anything like volition, 

 drives another school of thinkers into the denial of any 

 connection, save that of succession, between cause and 

 effect. 



A 



To sum up. If the materialist affirms that the 

 universe and all its phenomena are resolvable into 

 matter and motion, Berkeley replies, True ; but what 

 you call matter and motion are known to us only as 

 forms of consciousness ; their being is to be conceived 

 or known ; and the existence of a state of conscious- 

 ness, apart from a thinking mind, is a contradiction 

 in terms. 



I conceive that this reasoning is irrefragable. And 

 therefore, if I were obliged to choose between absolute 

 materialism and absolute idealism, I should feel com- 

 pelled to accept the latter alternative. Indeed, upon 

 this point Locke does, practically, go as far in the 

 direction of idealism as Berkeley, when he admits that 

 C the simple ideas we receive from sensation and reflec- 

 tion are the boundaries of our thoughts, beyond which 

 the mind, whatever efforts it would make, is not able 

 to advance one jot." Book II. chap, xxiii. 29. 



But Locke adds, " Nor can it make any discoveries 

 when it would pry into the nature and hidden causes of 

 these ideas." 



