ON ANCIENT AND MODERN SKEPTICS. 



407 



sensorium, 1 know not. But I am sure it can never perceive the external 

 bodies themselves, to which it is not present." 



Now allowing this fact, it follows of inevitable necessity, that the mind 

 does not of itself perceive an external world ; even any thing resembling" 

 an external world ; and we must take both its existence and the nature o^ 

 its existence upon the evidence of our external senses. Such an authority 

 may perhaps seem tolerably sufficient to most of my audience ; and I 

 trust 1 shall be able to prove, before we conclude, that the external senses 

 are as honest and as competent witnesses as any court of judicature can 

 reasonably desire. But it has somehow or other happened, as we have 

 already seen, that there have been a few wise and grave men, and of great 

 learning, talents, and moral excellence, in difeent periods of the world, 

 who have had a strange suspicion of their competency ; and have hunted 

 up facts and arguments to prove that their evidence is not worth a straw ; 

 that, in some cases, they have shown themselves egregious fools, and in 

 others arrant cheats ; that the testimony of one sense often opposes the 

 testimony of another sense ; that what appears smooth to the eye appears 

 rough to the touch ; that we cannot always distinguish a green from a 

 blue colour; and that v/e sometimes feel great awe and solemnity beneath 

 a deep and growing sdund, which we at first take to be a clap of thunder, 

 but afterwards find to be nothing more than the rumbling of a filthy cart ;; 

 that we mistake a phantasm, or phantasmagoria, for a figure of flesh and- 

 blood ; and occasionally see things just as clearly in our dreams as when 

 we are awake, though all the world with which we have then any concern 

 is a world of mere ideas — a world of our own making, and altogether 

 independent of the senses ; and, consequently, that it is possible the poet- 

 may speak somewhat more literally than he intended, when he tells us 



We are suc^ stuff 

 As dreams are made on, and our little life 

 Is rounded with a sleep. * 



This sort of reasoning, however, has not been confined to moderrs^ 

 times ; it was, I have already observed, the very arguments of Arcesiias,^ 

 and the skeptics of the Middle Academy, as it was called ; who^ in con- 

 sequence, contended that there is no truth or solidity in any thing : na^ 

 such thing as certainty or real knowledge ; and that all genuine philosophy 

 or wisdom consists in doubting. From a cause somewhat similar, Pyr- 

 rho, as I have likewise remarked, seems to have carried his skepticism tO' 

 a still further extravagance, though a very excellent man and enhghtened 

 philosopher in other respects : for he is said to have so far disbelieved the 

 real existence of every thing before him, that precipices were nothing ; 

 the points of swords and arrows were nothing ; the wheel of a carriage' 

 -that threatened to go over his neck vnas nothing. Insomuch that his 

 friends, who were not quite so far gone in philosophy, thought it right to 

 protect him against the effects of his own principles, and either accompa- 

 nied him themselves or set a keeper over him under the milder name of a 

 disciple. It was in vain that Plato pretended that the mind is loaded with^ 

 intellectual archetypes, or the incorporeal ideas, of all external objects ; 

 Aristotle that it perceives by immaterial phantasms ; and Epicurus by- 

 real species or effigies thrown forth from the objects themselves : Pyrrho 

 denied the whole of this jargon, and contended that if it could even be" 



* Tempe&t. 



0 



