806 FSTCHOLOOT. 



qualities,' more real than those * secondary ' qualities which 

 eye and ear and nose reveal. "Why do we thus so markedly 

 select the tangible to be the real ? Our motives are not far 

 to seek. The tangible qualities are the least fluctuating. 

 When we get them at all we get them the same. The other 

 qualities fluctuate enormously as our relative position to 

 the object changes. Then, more decisive still, the tactile 

 properties are those most intimately connected with our 

 weal or woe. A dagger hurts us only when in contact with 

 our skin, a poison only when we take it into our mouths, 

 and we can only use an object for our advantage when we 

 have it in our muscular control. It is as tangibles, then, 

 that things concern us most ; and the other senses, so far 

 as their practical use goes, do but warn us of what tangi- 

 ble things to expect. They are but organs of anticipa- 

 tory touch, as Berkeley has with perfect clearness ex- 

 plained.* 



Among all sensations, the most belief-compelling are 

 those productive of pleasure or of pain. Locke expressly 

 makes the 'pleasure- or pain-g\\mg quality to be the ultimate 

 human criterion of anything's reality. Discussing (with a 

 supposed Berkeleyan before Berkeley) the notion that all 

 our perceptions may be but a dream, he says : 



" He may please to dream that I make him this answer . . . that I 

 believe he will allow a very manifest ditference between dreaming of 

 being in the fire and being actually in it. But yet if he be resolved to 

 appear so sceptical as to maintain that what I call being actually in the 

 fire is nothing but a dream, and that we cannot thereby certainly know 

 that any such thing as fire actually exists without us, I answer that we, 

 certainly finding that pleasure or pain [or emotion of any sort] follows 

 upon the application of certain objects to us, whose existence we per- 

 ceive, or dream that we perceive by our senses, this certainly is as great 

 as our happiness or misery, beyond which we have no concernment to 

 know or to be."f 



* See Theory of Vision, § 59. 



f Essay, bk. iv. chap. 2, § 14. In another place: " He that sees a 

 candle burning and hath experimented the force of its flame by putting 

 his finger into it, will little doubt that this is something existing without 

 him, which does him harm and puts him to great pain. . . . And if our 

 dreamer pleases to try whether the glowing heat of a glass furnace be 

 barely a wandering imagination in a drowsy man's fancy by putting his 

 hand into it, he may, perhaps, be awakened into a certainty greater than 



