known 'psychological theory of matter' – the modern version of Berkeley and Hume. Berkeley's own theological idealism is, of course, not here in point, because sense-phenomena are there referred to the divine will as a trans-subjective real cause, and so the all-important epistemological step is made. But Mill, with Hume's example before him, will not wittingly overstep the line which severs experience from what is and must be beyond experience. He has thus to supply a background to the tangled confusion and abrupt inconsequences of our actual sensations and at the same time to seem to avoid making the epistemological transition from sensation to something different in kind from sensation. Though not itself actual sensation, this explanatory supplement must be in a manner homogeneous and continuous with sensation; though ex hypothesi not itself experience, it must hoist the colors of experience, and so avoid the appearance of transcendency which your true Empiricist shuns like the very plague.
Mill states the necessities of the case in a sufficiently candid way, "What is it which leads us to say that the objects we perceive are external to us and not part of our own thoughts? We mean that there is concerned in our perceptions something which exists when we are not thinking of it, which existed before we had ever thought of it, and would exist if we were annihilated; and further, that there exist things which we never saw, touched, or otherwise perceived, and things which never have been perceived by man. This idea of something which is distinguished from our fleeting impressions by what, in Kantian language, is called Perdurability; something which is fixed and the same while our impressions vary; something which exists whether we are aware of it or not – constitutes altogether our idea of external substance. Whoever can assign an origin to this complex conception, has accounted for what we mean by the belief in matter."[1] Mill's own explanation is his celebrated theory of 'Permanent Possibilities of Sensation.' No undue stress need be laid here on the use of
- ↑ Examination of Hamilton, p. 221 (3d ed).
