Ill THE ORIGIN OF THE IMPRESSIONS 95 



special charm for rhetorical sciolists, would not 

 be applied to it. But it is, nevertheless, true 

 that the doctrine contains nothing inconsistent 

 with the purest idealism. For, as Hume remarks 

 (as indeed Descartes had observed long before) : 



' ' 'Tis not our body we perceive when we regard our limbs 

 and members, but certain impressions which enter by the 

 senses ; so that the ascribing a real and corporeal existence to 

 these impressions, or to their objects, is an act of the mind as 

 difficult to explain as that [the external existence of objects] 

 which we examine at present." (I. p. 249.) 



Therefore, if we analyse the proposition that all 

 mental phenomena are the effects or products of 

 material phenomena, all that it means amounts to 

 this : that whenever those states of consciousness 

 which we call sensation, or emotion, or thought, 

 come into existence, complete investigation will 

 show good reason for the belief that they are 

 preceded by those other phenomena of conscious- 

 ness to which we give the names of matter and 

 motion. All material changes appear, in the long 

 run, to be modes of motion ; but our knowledge of 

 motion is nothing but that of a change in the 

 place and order of our sensations; just as our 

 knowledge of matter is restricted to those feelings 

 of which we assume it to be the cause. 



It has already been pointed out, that Hume 

 must have admitted, and in fact does admit, the 

 possibility that the mind is a Leibnitzian monad, 

 or a Fichtean world-generating Ego, the universe 



