406 



ON ANCIENT AND MODERN SKEPTICS. 



he asserts that their ideas resemble them, as being drawn from patterns 

 existing in the bodies themselves, the sense of the passage has been very 

 generally mistaken, and opinions have hence been ascribed to him which 

 are contrary to the whole tenor of his system. In consequence of being 

 real representatives, of real quaUties, they resemble them in respect to 

 REALITY. And this, I think, seems to be what Mr. Locke intended to 

 express upon this subject ; though he does not discover his usual clearness 

 as to what he designed to convey by the term resemblakce. This view, 

 however, will be still more obvious by comparing the seventh, ninth, and' 

 twenty-third sections of the eighth chapter of his second book, in which he 

 asserts, that the secondaky qualities of bodies, as they are usually called, 

 and which he contrasts with the primary before us, have no real existence 

 in their respective bodies, and are nothing more than powers instead of 

 qualities. And hence, while the ideas of the primary qualities of bodies * 

 are real representatives of real quahties, and to this extent resemble them, 

 the ideas of their secondary qualities are only real representatives, of 

 ostensible or imaginary qualities, in regard at least to the subjects to which 

 they appear to belong, and consequently have n© resemblance to them 

 whatever. 



What, however, Locke thus modestly glanced at, others, with all the 

 confidence of the Greek philosophers, have boldly plunged into ; and the 

 consequence has been that they have met with the very same success as 

 the Greek philosophers, and revived the very same errors : — some having 

 been bewildered into a disbelief of the soul, others into a disbelief of the 

 body, and others, again, still more whimsically, into a disbelief of both 

 soul and body at the same time ; contending not only that there is no such 

 thing as a world about them, but no such thing as themselves, except at 

 the very moment they start either this or any other idea of equal brilliance. 



We have already seen, that the ideas of the mind have no resemblance 

 whatever to the external objects by which they are produced ; unless in 

 the case of the primary qualities of bodies, in which, as just observed, the 

 term resemblance may be applied in a figurative sense, the only sense, as 

 • I shall show more fully hereafter, in which it was ever employed by Mr. 

 Locke. 



This is a fact so clear as to be admitted by almost every school of phi- 

 losophy. Between an external object and an idea or thought of the 

 mind," observes Dr. Beattie, " there is not, there cannot possibly be, any 

 resemblance."* So, in continuation, a grain of sand and the globe of 

 the earth ; a burning coal, and a lump of ice ; a drop of ink and a sheet of 

 white paper, resemble each other in being extended, solid, figured, colour- 

 ed, and divisible ; but a thought or idea has no extension, sohdity, figure, 

 colour, or divisibihty : so that no two external objects can be so unlike, 

 as an external object, and (what philosophers call) the idea of it." To the 

 same effect Dr. Potterfield : How body acts upon mind, or mind upon 

 body, T know not ; but this I am very certain of, that nothing can act or 

 be acted upon where it is not ; and therefore our mind can never perceive 

 any thing but its own modifications, and the various states of the sensorium 

 to which it is present. So that it is not the external sun and moon which 

 are in the heavens that our mind perceives, but only their image or repre- 

 sentation impressed on the sensorium. How the soul of a seeing man sees 

 those images, or how it receives those ideas from such agitations in the 



* On Truth, part ii. ch. ii. p. 165. 



