never, we say, maintains anything like this, as Mr Bailey represents him to do. It may therefore be asserted with hesitation, that there is nothing in the whole history of philosophical criticism analogous to the blunder of his reviewer. Nothing is easier than to answer a disputant when we confute, as his, a theory of our making.
Berkeley informs us, that visual sensation—that is, the direct perception of the outness of visible things with regard to one another, having been frequently accompanied with sensations of their tactual outness and tactual magnitudes, comes at length, through the law of association, to suggest to us that they are external also to the eye, although we never see them to be so; and to suggest this to us, of course as the word suggestion implies—in the absence of the tactual sensations. Thus the visual sensations, which, in the absence of the tactual sensations, call up the tactual sensations, resemble a language, the words of which, in the absence of things, call up the ideas of things. Thus the word rose, in the absence of a rose, suggests the idea of that flower; and thus a visible rose, not seen as external to the eye, does, in the absence of a tangible or touched rose, suggest a tangible or touched rose as an object external to the eye. "But," says Mr Bailey, "this comparison completely fails. To make it tally we must suppose that the audible name, by suggesting the visible flower, becomes itself a visible object." What! does he then suppose that Berkeley holds that the visible flower, by suggesting the tangible flower, becomes itself a tangible object? To make Mr Bailey's objection tell, Berkeley must be represented as holding this monstrous opinion, which he most assuredly never did.
Our limits prevent us from following either Berkeley or his reviewer through the further details of this speculation. But we think that we have pointed out with sufficient distinctness Mr Bailey's fundamental blunder, upon which the whole of his supposed refutation of Berkeley is built, and which consists in this: that he conceives the Bishop to maintain that the perception of visible outness, or the distance of objects among themselves, is as much the result of suggestion as the knowledge of tangible outness, or the distance of objects from the organ of sight. He seems to think Berkeley's doctrine to be this: that our visual sensations are mere internal feelings, in which there is originally and directly no kind of outness at all involved, not even the outness of one visible thing from another visible thing; and that this outness is in some way or other suggested to the mind by these internal feelings. But, says he, Berkeley's theory demands more than this: for the internal feeling not only suggests the idea of the external object, but by doing so suggests the idea, or, if I may use figure, infuses the perception of its own externality." And he cannot understand how this result should be produced by any process of association. But neither does Berkeley's theory demand that it should; for this "internal feeling" is itself, as we have already remarked, the direct perception of visible outness,—that is to say, the outness of objects in relation, for instance, to our own visible bodies; and so far there is no suggestion at all in the case, nor any occasion for any suggestion. Suggestion comes into play when we judge that, over and above the outness of objects viewed in relation to themselves and our visible bodies, there is another kind of outness connected with these objects, namely, their outness in relation to the organ itself which perceives them; and this suggestion takes place only after we have learned, through the experience of touch, to localize that organ. Having thus indicated the leading mistake which lies at the root of Mr Bailey's attempted refutation, we shall bid adieu both to him and Berkeley, and shall conclude by hazarding one or two speculations of our own, in support of the conclusions of the latter.
How do we come to judge that objects are external to the eye as distinguished from our perception, that they are external to one another—and how do we come to judge that they possess a real magnitude quite different from their visible magnitude? These are the two fundamental questions of the Berkeleian optics; and in endeavouring to answer them, we must go to work experimentally, and strive to apprehend the virgin facts of seeing, uncombined with any other facts we may have become acquainted with from other sources. Let us suppose, then, that we are merely an eye, which, however, as it is not yet either tangible or localized, we shall call the soul the seer. Let this seer be provided with a due complement of objects, which are mere
