132 MYSTICISM AND LOGIC 



would be called " states of mind," which would belong 

 together in virtue of some specific common quality. The 

 common quality of all states of mind would be the quality 

 designated by the word " mental " ; and besides this we 

 should have to suppose that each separate person's 

 states of mind have some common characteristic distin- 

 guishing them from the states of mind of other people. 

 Ignoring this latter point, let us ask ourselves whether 

 the quality designated by the word " mental " does, as a 

 matter of observation, actually belong to objects of sense, 

 such as colours or noises. I think any candid person 

 must reply that, however difficult it may be to know what 

 we mean by "mental," it is not difficult to see that 

 colours and noises are not mental in the sense of having 

 that intrinsic peculiarity which belongs to beliefs and 

 wishes and volitions, but not to the physical world. 

 Berkeley advances on this subject a plausible argument 1 

 which seems to me to rest upon an ambiguity in the word 

 " pain." He argues that the realist supposes the heat 

 which he feels in approaching a fire to be something 

 outside his mind, but that as he approaches nearer and 

 nearer to the fire the sensation of heat passes imper- 

 ceptibly into pain, and that no one could regard pain as 

 something outside the mind. In reply to this argument, 

 it should be observed in the first place that the heat of 

 which we are immediately aware is not in the fire but in 

 our own body. It is only by inference that the fire is 

 judged to be the cause of the heat which we feel in our 

 body. In the second place (and this is the more im- 

 portant point), when we speak of pain we may mean one 

 of two things : we may mean the object of the sensation 

 or other experience which has the quality of being painful, 



1 First dialogue between Hylas and Philonous, Works (Fraser's 

 edition 1901), I, p. 384. 



