Fallunt nos oculi, vagique sensus
Oppressâ ratione mentiuntur.
And yet to speak properly, and to do our senses right, simply they are not deceived, but only administer an occasion to our forward understandings to deceive themselves: and so though they are some way accessory to our delusion; yet the more principal faculties are the Capital offenders. Thus if the Senses represent the Earth as fixt and immoveable; they give us the truth of their Sentiments: To sense it is so, and it would be deceit to present it otherwise. For (as we have shewn) though it do move in itself; it rests to us, who are carry'd with it.... But if hence our Understandings falsely deduct, that there is the same quality in the external impressor; 'tis, it is criminal, our sense is innocent. When the Ear tingles, we really hear a sound: If we judge it without us, it's the fallacy of our Judgments. The apparitions of our frighted Phancies are real sensibles: But if we translate them without the compass of our Brains, and apprehend them as external objects; it's the unwary rashness of our Understanding deludes us. And if our disaffected Palates resent nought but bitterness from our choicest viands, we truly tast the unpleasing quality, though falsely conceive it in that, which is no more then the occasion of its production. If any find fault with the novelty of the notion; the learned St. Austin stands ready to confute the charge: and they who revere Antiquity, will derive satisfaction from so venerable a suffrage. He tells us, Si quis remum frangi in aquâ opinatur, et, cum aufertur,integrari; non malum habet internuncium, sed malus est Judex. And onward to this purpose, The sense could not otherwise perceive it in the water, neither ought it: For since the Water is one thing, and the Air another; 'tis requisite and necessary, that the sense should be as different as the medium: Wherefore the Eye sees aright; if there be a mistake, 'tis the Judgement's the Deceiver. Elsewhere he saith, that our Eyes misinform us not, but faithfully transmit their resentment to the mind. And against the Scepticks, That it's a piece of injustice to complain of our senses, and to exact from them an account, which is beyond the sphear of their notice: and resolutely determines, Quicquid possunt videre oculi, verum vident. So that what we have said of the senses deceptions, is rigidly to be charg'd only on our careless Understandings, misleading us through the ill management of sensible informations." Glanvill, Vanity of Dogmatizing. Chap. x. First Ed. p. 91, seq.
The reader may like to consider how far Glanvill's apology for the senses is removed from the following propositions laid down by a recent writer just quoted who thus defends while he limits the veracity of sense-impressions:—
"What we directly apprehend," writes Professor Helmholtz, "is not the immediate action of the external exciting cause upon the ends of our nerves, but only the changed condition of the nervous fibres which we call the state of excitation or functional activity." And further on:—"The simple rule for all illusions of sight is this: we always believe that we see such objects as would, under conditions of normal vision, produce the retinal image of which we are actually conscious. If these images are such as could not be produced by any normal kind of observation, we judge of them according to their nearest resemblance; and in forming this judgment, we more easily neglect the parts of sensation which are imperfectly than those which are perfectly apprehended. When more than one interpretation is possible, we usually waver involuntarily between them; but it is possible to end this uncertainty by bringing the idea of any of the possible interpretations we choose as vividly as possible before the mind by a conscious effort of the will." Helmholtz on The Recent Progress of the Theory of Vision. pp. 230, 31 and p. 307.
[104] Two acute reasoners, who will be alternately acquitted of madness by contending schools of thought, have arrived at conclusions very favourable to the sanity of idealizing men. In his first lecture at the Royal Institution, Professor Masson spoke in the following terms of Hume and Fichte. "There is the system of Nihilism, or, as it may be better called, Non-Substantialism. According to this system, the Phænomenal Cosmos, whether regarded as consisting of two parallel successions of phænomena (Mind and Matter), or of only one (Mind or Matter), resolves itself, on analysis, into an absolute Nothingness,—mere appearances with no credible substratum of Reality; a play of phantasms in a void. If there have been no positive or dogmatic Nihilists, yet both Hume for one purpose, and Fichte for another, have propounded Nihilism as the ultimate issue of all reasoning that does not start with some à priori postulate."—Recent British Philosophy, p. 66. The reader will observe that to raise the question fully, we have spoken of the special form of Idealism to which Mr. Mill gives the first place in his description, (Examination of Hamilton's Philosophy, p. 8.) "According to one of the forms, the sensations which, in common parlance, we are said to receive from objects, are not only all that we can possibly know of the objects, but are all that we have any ground for believing to exist.——Those who hold this opinion are said to doubt or deny the existence of matter. They are sometimes called by the name Idealists, sometimes by that of Sceptics, according to the other opinions which they hold. They include the followers of Berkeley and those of Hume. Among recent thinkers, the acute and accomplished Professor Ferrier, though by a circuitous path, and expressing himself in a very different phraseology, seems to have arrived at essentially the same point of view. These philosophers maintain the Relativity of our knowledge in the most extreme form in which the doctrine can be understood, since they contend, not merely that all we can possibly know of anything is the manner in which it affects the human faculties, but that there is nothing else to be known; that affections of human or of some other minds are all that we can know to exist."
Mr. Mill's own position will be found in his 11th Chapter. After defining Matter to be a "Permanent Possibility of Sensation," (p. 227) and explaining his definition, he writes in a note (p. 232), the following decisive sentences: "My able American critic, Dr. H. B. Smith, contends through several pages that these facts afford no proofs that objects are external to us. I never pretended that they do. I am accounting for our conceiving, or representing to ourselves, the Permanent Possibilities as real objects external to us. I do not believe that the real externality to us of anything, except other minds, is capable of proof."
Mr. O'Hanlon's pamphlet entitled "A Criticism of John Stuart Mill's Pure Idealism; and an attempt to shew that, if logically carried out, it is Pure Nihilism," seems less known than it deserves to be. Mr. Mill noticed and answered it in his 3rd Edition—chiefly among the criticisms commencing p. 244.——Mr. O'Hanlon's early decease has given a painful interest to his promising labours. Some paragraphs from his now scarce pamphlet are placed at the end of Additional Note D, on "Pure Idealism."
[105] On Hamilton. p. 6. Mill is thus echoed from across the broad Atlantic;—"The profoundest question of philosophy turns on the relation of Thought to Being, Mind to Matter, Subject to Object, or (in empiricistic phrase) Organism to Environment. Is the Organism purely the product of the Environment? Then we have Empiricism, Sensationalism, Materialism, whose motto is that of Destutt-Tracy,—"Penser c'est sentir." Is the Environment the product of the Organism? Then we have Transcendentalism, Egoism, Idealism, whose motto is that of Berkeley,—"The esse of objects is percipi." F. E. Abbot, in The Index (American), for July 27, 1872.
[106] Lord Macaulay has some pertinent and characteristic remarks concerning this topic in his literary estimate of Dr. Johnson. "How it chanced that a man who reasoned on his premises so ably, should assume his premises so foolishly, is one of the great mysteries of human nature. The same inconsistency may be observed in the schoolmen of the middle ages. Those writers show so much acuteness and force of mind in arguing on their wretched data, that a modern reader is perpetually at a loss to comprehend how such minds came by such data. Not a flaw in the superstructure of the theory which they are rearing escapes their vigilance. Yet they are blind to the obvious unsoundness of the foundation. It is the same with some eminent lawyers. Their legal arguments are intellectual prodigies, abounding with the happiest analogies and the most refined distinctions. The principles of their arbitrary science being once admitted, the statute-book and the reports being once assumed as the foundations of reasoning, these men must be allowed to be perfect masters of logic. But if a question arises as to the postulates on which their whole system rests, if they are called upon to vindicate the fundamental maxims of that system which they have passed their lives in studying, these very men often talk the language of savages or of children." (Essays, Ed. 1852. p. 175.) As to the schoolmen, any one who wishes to form a fair idea of their acuteness with little trouble to himself, may consult the "Synopsis Distinctionum" of H. L. Castanæus, a book found in most learned libraries.