52 BEING AND FACULTIES OF MAN. 



the limits in which the Bishop employs the remark. But 

 when it is used as an argument against the possibility of 

 any comparison between the impressions of vision and 

 the impressions of touch, &c., it instantly ceases to be 

 true, for Berkeley has wholly overlooked the fact that it 

 is not the physical faculty, but the Consciousness, that 

 perceives the impressions of touch and vision, and that 

 the Consciousness is capable of comparing all its im- 

 pressions and of testing and verifying them by all the 

 processes of reasoning and all the aids of science ; so that 

 it comes at last, as the result of perfectly correct mental 

 investigation, to perceive that images are inverted in the 

 eye, and yet not inverted to the touch, and that a thing 

 may thus be logically and consistently true in all its par- 

 ticulars which is not apparent to the physical perception 

 or immediate experience. The Consciousness can also 

 test and convince us of the fact, that an object which the 

 hand touches is the same object which the eye sees, and 

 that the points of correspondence between them are not 

 merely few and limited, like a set of coincidences, but 

 are universal in all particulars, and without a single ex- 

 ception. This species of correspondence the Consciousness 

 rightly perceives can amount to nothing short of identity, 

 for nothing but identity is capable of it. 



The Bishop also holds that the perception of distance 

 is an acquired, and not an immediate perception of the 

 eye. But in this particular he has also overlooked the 

 fact that the Consciousness is the real perceptive power. 

 If he had only considered the fact that a common mirror 

 in reflecting objects shows distance and perspective cor- 

 rectly, and that the retina is just such a mirror, and 

 possesses the same reflecting qualities and powers, which 

 are fixed and uniform in their action under unalterable 

 optical laws, and that the retina's impressions therefore 

 do not and cannot improve or alter by the effect of educa- 



