CONSTITUENTS OF MATTER 133 



or we may mean the quality of painfulness itself. When 

 a man says he has a pain in his great toe, what he means 

 is that he has a sensation associated with his great toe 

 and having the quality of painfulness. The sensation 

 itself, like every sensation, consists in experiencing a 

 sensible object, and the experiencing has that quality of 

 painfulness which only mental occurrences can have, but 

 which may belong to thoughts or desires, as well as to 

 sensations. But in common language we speak of the 

 sensible object experienced in a painful sensation as a 

 pain, and it is this way of speaking which causes the 

 confusion upon which the plausibility of Berkeley's 

 argument depends. It would be absurd to attribute the 

 quality of painfulness to anything non-mental, and hence 

 it comes to be thought that what we call a pain in the toe 

 must be mental. In fact, however, it is not the sensible 

 object in such a case which is painful, but the sensation, 

 that is to say, the experience of the sensible object. As 

 the heat which we experience from the fire grows greater, 

 the experience passes gradually from being pleasant to 

 being painful, but neither the pleasure nor the pain is a 

 quality of the object experienced as opposed to the 

 experience, and it is therefore a fallacy to argue that this 

 object must be mental on the ground that painfulness can 

 only be attributed to what is mental. 



If, then, when we say that something is in the mind 

 we mean that it has a certain recognisable intrinsic 

 characteristic such as belongs to thoughts and desires, it 

 must be maintained on grounds of immediate inspection 

 that objects of sense are not in any mind. 



A different meaning of " in the mind " is, however, to 

 be inferred from the arguments advanced by those who 

 regard sensible objects as being in the mind. The argu- 

 ments used are, in the main, such as would prove the 



