[58] “Observations on Man,” vol. i. p. 11.

[59] Ibid. p. 8. The speculations of Bonnet are remarkably similar to those of Hartley; and they appear to have originated independently, though the “Essai de Psychologie” (1754) is of five years’ later date than the “Observations on Man” (1749).

[60] “An Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense,” chap. ii. § 2. Reid affirms that “it is genius, and not the want of it, that adulterates philosophy, and fills it with error and false theory;” and no doubt his own lucubrations are free from the smallest taint of the impurity to which he objects. But, for want of something more than that sort of “common sense,” which is very common and a little dull, the contemner of genius did not notice that the admission here made knocks so big a hole in the bottom of “common sense philosophy,” that nothing can save it from foundering in the dreaded abyss of Idealism.

[61] The following diagrammatic scheme may help to elucidate the theory of sensation:—

Mediate Knowledge

Immediate

Sensiferous Apparatus

Knowledge

Objects of sense│
│
│
│

Receptive
(sense Organ)

Transmissive
(Nerve)

Sensificatory
(Sensorium)

│
│
│
│

Sensations and
other States of
Consciousness

│
│		 │
│

Hypothetical
Substance of
Matter

│
│
│		 │
│
│

Hypothetical
Substance of
Mind

Physical World

Mental World

Not Self

Self

Non-Ego or Object

Ego or Subject

Immediate knowledge is confined to states of consciousness, or, in other words, to the phenomena of mind. Knowledge of the physical world, or of one’s own body and of objects external to it, is a system of beliefs or judgments based on the sensations. The term “self” is applied not only to the series of mental phenomena which constitute the ego, but to the fragment of the physical world which is their constant concomitant. The corporeal self, therefore, is part of the non-ego; and is objective in relation to the ego as subject.

[62] “Chaque fibre est une espèce de touche ou de marteau destiné à rendre un certain ton.”—Bonnet, “Essai de Psychologie,” chap. iv.

[63] The “Exercitationes de Generatione Animalium,” which Dr. George Ent extracted from him and published in 1651.

[64] “De Generatione Animalium,” lib ii. cap. x.

[65] “De Generatione,” lib. ii. cap. iv.