THINGS DENOTED BY NAMES. 



37 



sensations of our organs of touch and 

 of our muscles ; its weight, which is 

 also a sensation of touch and of the 

 muscles ; its colour, which is a sensa- 

 tion of sight ; its hardness, which is 

 a sensation of the muscles ; its com- 

 position, which is another word for all 

 the varieties of sensation which we 

 receive under various circumstances 

 from the wood of which it is made, 

 and so forth. All or most of these 

 various sensations frequently are, and, 

 as we learn by experience, always 

 might be, experienced simultaneously, 

 or in many different orders of succes- 

 sion at our own choice : and hence 

 the thought of any one of them makes 

 us think of the others, and the whole 

 becomes mentally amalgamated into 

 one mixed state of consciousness, 

 which, in the language of the school 

 of Locke and Hartley, is termed a 

 Complex Idea. 



Now, there are philosophers who 

 have argued as follows. If we con- 

 ceive an orange to be divested of its 

 natural colour without acquiring any 

 new one ; to lose its softness without 

 becoming hard, its roundness without 

 becoming square or pentagonal, or of 

 any other regular or irregular figure 

 whatever ; to be deprived of size, of 

 weight, of taste, of smell ; to lose all 

 its mechanical and all its chemical 

 properties, and acquire no new ones ; 

 to become in short, invisible, intan- 

 gible, imperceptible not only by all our 

 senses, but by the senses of all other 

 sentient beings, real or possible ; no- 

 thing, say these thinkers, would re- 

 main. For of what nature, they ask, 

 could be the residuum ? and by what 

 token could it manifest its presence ? 

 To the unreflecting its existence seems 

 to rest on the evidence of the senses. 

 But to the senses nothing is appa- 

 rent except the sensations. We know, 

 indeed, that these sensations are bound 

 together by some law ; they do not 

 come together at random, but accord- 

 ing to a systematic order, which is 

 part of the order established in the 

 universe. When we experience one 

 of these sensations, we usually experi- 



ence the others also, or know that we 

 have it in our power to experience 

 them. But a fixed law of connection, 

 making the sensations occur together, 

 does not, say these philosophers, 

 necessarily require what is called a 

 substratum to support them. The 

 conception of a substratum is but one 

 of many possible forms in which that 

 connection presents itself to our imagi- 

 nation ; a mode of, as it were, re- 

 alizing the idea. If there be such a 

 substratum, suppose it at this instant 

 miraculously annihilated, and let the 

 sensations continue to occur in the 

 same order, and how would the sub- 

 stratum be missed ? By what signs 



j should we be able to discover that its 

 existence had terminated ? Should 

 we not have as much reason to believe 



: that it still existed as we now have ? 

 And if we should not then be war- 

 ranted in believing it, how can we be 

 so now ? A body, therefore, according, 

 to these metaphysicians, is not any- 

 thing intrinsically different from the 

 sensations which the body is said to 

 produce in us ; it is, in short, a set of 

 sensations, or rather, of possibilities 

 of sensation, joined together according 

 to a fixed law. 



j The controversies to which these 

 speculations have given rise, and the 

 doctrines which have been developed 

 in the attempt to find a conclusive 



I answer to them, have been fruitful of 

 important consequences to the Science 



j of Mind. The sensations (it was an- 

 swered) which we are conscious of, 

 and which we receive, not at random, 

 but joined togetherin a certain uniform 

 manner, imply not only a law or laws 



, of connection, but a cause external to 

 our mind, which cause, by its own 



I laws, determines the laws according 



j to which the sensations are connected 



I and experienced. The schoolmen 

 used to call this external cause by the 

 name we have already employed, a *m6- 

 stratuni ; and its attributes (as they 

 expressed themselves) inherent, liter- 

 ally stuck, in it. To this substratum 

 the name Matter is usually given 

 in philosophical discussions. It was 



